Allright, it’s fast again!
Three cheers for Gilby!
What is??? 
The forums. Loading times had been really sluggish for at least a couple of weeks, and so I sent a pm to Gilby about it, and he said he would work on fixing it. 
I also noticed the the Most Replies thread has vanished too also.
All software on the site got an upgrade. None of that helped. The debugging stuff in vbulletin times how long mysql takes and how long php takes, and was telling me that the the database was flying, while the php was the sluggish part… which was puzzling as any slowness is usually the result of the database. The server had lots of idle CPU available and the disk IO wasn’t very high, so the hardware was not the issue. Since vB pointed at php as being the problem, I did some php debugging, which pointed me back to mysql as it as those functions that were taking a long time to run. vbulletin’s debug was wrong! The database tables got optimized, but still no luck with speeding it up. Looking at the “locked” threads in mysql didn’t point at a specific problem. I didn’t return to the problem until yesterday, when I decided to hide the most replies thread. That seems to have done the trick…
So does this mean we can blame Terry for the loss of MR and its precious post counts? 
yup
Haha, the top poster went from 24 thousand to 12 thousand.
Most replies was bigger then I thought
you fergot that in the german forum there’s a thread called “Schlagt den Most Replys Thread” (in englisch: beat the most replys thread) which hast 19363 posts 
But at what cost?
minutes silence for MR
Gild playing amazing grace on bagpipes in the background
We can thank our lucky stars for Terry Peterson once again. I swear, nothing would get done in this UniVerse if it weren’t for Terry Peterson.
Whoa, MR is gone. 
Wow, what a monster thread it must have been? R.I.P.
Now I wish I’d posted in it.
Eish
couldnt resist…
Can the old MR thread be dumped to a huge XML file that we can download as an archive?
Perhaps we should just plan on locking MR when it reaches some large number of posts and then restart with MR II, MR III, MR IV, etc.
Splitters!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but it seems that when Gilby got rid of the ghost pages, THAT was when the forum speeded up. There’s been no noticable difference for me since we lost MR.
I’ll figure out some way to archive it. Might be able to optimize the table indexes or use a different type of table to get it to not affect everything else.
Could you seal it in an acrylic block and send it out with the next deep space probe?