Forum host upgrade - proposal

[Ted Hess]

Hi all -

Those of you who visit the forum have probably noticed its, sometimes 
extreme, sluggishness over the last several months. Since April, I have 
worked on and applied a number of attempts at tuning, cleanup and 
storage re-arrangement to try and alleviate these issues. As best as I 
can determine, we have have just simply exceeded the capacity of the 
current Droplet CPU and RAM. To upgrade to a system with 2X CPU/RAM 
(4vCPU/8GB -> 8vCPU/16GB) will increase cost from $48/mo to $96-112/mo. 
The difference in cost is a "Regular Intel" vs "Premium Intel" 
processors. The Premium (latest Xeon) option will provide enhanced NVMe 
SSDs which would improve DB performance (a bit). I think it would be 
worth $112/mo for maximal impact on the responsiveness of the forum. AMD 
vs Intel - cost is the same. AMD may be slightly higher GHz.

Are there any objections / reasons why we shouldn't go ahead and do the 
upgrade. There are a couple of methods available however, the down-time 
will probably be 1-3hrs. if no problems. This isn't the first system 
upgrade we have done, so I expect no issues.

If any of you wish to see some of the forum performance stats, I can 
post another message with numbers and personal observations. A quick 
overview of what our daily forum activity looks like:

* Serving 120-160K page views. (about 25% attributed to crawlers - a 
different discussion)
* 6-8K mail messages generated
* ~1100 User visits (signed-in)
* ~200 engaged users (liked or posted)
* ~500 new posts

Footnote on bandwidth usage... (DO charges bandwidth on aggregate 
Droplet use)
Proposed Droplet upgrade will add 3TB to our total.
I don't have per-Droplet stats, but last month we transmitted ~29TB of 
our 25TB allowance. A $40 overage cost.