Yep! Thats been on my MSN contact list for the past 14 hours or so to inform the staff and contacts that the server speed seems to be fixed. Lemme explain what happened.
We were hit hard by a few sites after translating and posting the news on a Keygen that searches and tries to validate XP keys. The Register alone sent almost 9000 hits to us in that one day, our counter went haywire and we now think we know why.
After talking to our host to confirm the traffic to Neowin (was above 3000 online users) they said that their admin panel stops counting after 3000. Our counter on the main page however continued to count well above 3000. At this point the MySQL database that checks the IP and logs it for our stats became corrupt. We started to wonder when the counter went over 16000 (online users) and accepted it because, well.. the site was real slow due to all them hits right? wrong.. Due to the corrupt table in the database not being able to log properly was causing the major slowdowns to the server. We did a repair and that helped. We considered resetting the counters and go from there, but for safety reasons we have decided to pull the "realtime stats" which has improved the site speed alot! (stats use alot of queries to the SQL). So this is a heads up to let you know that we were able to track down that issue.
As you know the Neowin script is custom and has taken a beating due to the amount of connections to it, this is an on-going process to improve upon what we have and I would like to add that we are again open to suggestions and feature requests. You can find the thread and our current plans here
As usual thankyou for your patience on this :) and other issues, we hope that by keeping you informed you are better able to see what goes on behind the scenes at Neowin.net