I honestly don't know if it's a matter of money or just AC's time. Theoretically we could do a fundraiser for professional help or something, but it all comes down to what AC wants to do.
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Thus, the push to move chat onto an external site. It's pretty much guaranteed that it will be up and running fine.
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It's a bit of both but honestly throwing money at the server and getting better hardware won't do as much as people think. I will take some time to do some clean up and hopefully get things in better shape but it mostly boils down to what you said... old software(that people prefer) and a HUGE database.
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I vote to change to the more efficient software. No, I don't know how to do it. :-)
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What DB is this is using?
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MariaDB 10.0.38. Most of the tables are MyISAM. I've debated messing around and seeing what would happen if I changed the POST table (which is the problem) to InnoDB, but it would likely take hours to change it and hours to change back if it still sucks. Plus, it could also royally break stuff. So I've decided I'm probably not the best one to do it. :-)

At some point, if we decide we're just going to live with this software forever, we may need to consider pruning the database down. I've mulled over something like cloning the site and DB, then putting it at a different URL as a pure archive (no new posts), then pruning the active CP site down to just threads/posts from the past 5 years or something. Constantly sorting a 13 GB table almost has to be the biggest issue. There are better ways of doing the query in newer versions of vBulletin, but the queries in this version suck donkey balls.

The one hardware upgrade that I wonder might help would be to move to a server where we could throw the entire database onto SSDs rather than HDDs. I could be wrong, but it seems like IO is probably the issue, so moving the DB onto a drive that would respond a lot faster might help. Maybe.

So for what it's worth, here are the options as I see them:

• Live with what we have. Possibly try a few things that probably won't help much. The end.
• Try a hardware upgrade (new server with SSDs for storage maybe). Might not really help much. Tough to say. But could work. Very time intensive for AC.
• Prune the database. Some loss of functionality (couldn't bump a 15-year old thread, which can be fun sometimes). Moderate amount of time for AC.
• Move to completely different software. We'd gain a lot of features in "modern" software, but we'd lose some functionality people are used to here for sure. Rep would work differently. Thumbs would work differently. Categories and prefixes would work differently. Mod options like thread bans might not work. It would almost certainly fix the lag issues, but there are plenty of sites out there that have gone under due to major functionality changes, so it's not a decision to make lightly. Would be an insane amount of work for AC and high amount of work for others like me and Bearcat to try and tweak all of the settings to make things as familiar as possible.

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Percona >
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Thank you for such a thorough and we'll explained answer.

When you take nearly 20 years of data and allow it to be searchable and accessible to reuse, it chews up CPU for sure.

This site also has an enormous amount of graphics, gifs and videos that add to the crush.

Could an archive DB be setup to house a lot of older stuff that is still accessable but not always indexed and updated?

I recall a large medical company like Merck or someone similar had an issue like this.
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If you're asking if there's a function in vBulletin to put things in a different table than the POST table, the answer is no. If the posts exist on ChiefsPlanet, they exist in the POST table.

The version that I was suggesting would literally mean cloning the entire thing into a new installation like archive.chiefsplanet.com. There would be no interaction between the two, so if you wanted to "bump a post" from 2005, you'd just have to start a thread and link to it.
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To be honest, do we really need access to everything ever said here? I get wanting to leave this place intact for as long as possible but thats a lot of posts to track. Seems like it would be better to archive at least once per decade, maybe even every 5 years. I'm sure its not just that simple though.
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Yeah, if it helps, I'm sure people will live with it. You could still theoretically go back and find stuff on the "archive" site. You just couldn't bump threads. So if someone wanted to say "what was my first post" or whatever, you could still do it.
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Sorry guys, it’s all of us Texas Tech fans who are now Chiefs fans. I rarely post, but I load the site probably 40-50 times a day (usually as a guest because, well, you guys know, doing activities that require me to clear browsing history and cookies on the regular so that the wife doesn’t see, and I forget to sign back in...).

I know it’s not much, but if there is a fundraiser, I’m in for a few bucks. I plan to be here for the next 50 or so years until I kick the bucket (at which point I’m sure we will all be able to upload our consciousnesses into a virtual ChiefsPlanet anywase - **** can these servers support that?).
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Just Nuke DC and ban political talk in the lounge, if they want to start a spin-off circle jerk on something like Discord, sweet. 2+ million posts of fucking garbage.
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One could argue the picture forum is an incredible strain. Just sayin. :-)
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Just looked, 12 million posts on CP, 11k members

- nuke 2 million posts in DC
- nuke accounts with 0 posts that haven’t logged in in say, 2 years
- nuke all threads (and posts) with 10 or fewer posts (is that a thing?)
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