I'm pleased to let everyone know we have finalized an order for several new servers to support the GPWA website.
Most importantly, we are ordering the hardware for a new MySQL server to replace the current one used to power the GPWA forum. Currently our MySQL server has 4GB of memory with an Intel Xeon E5430 processor. We're upgrading this to new server with an E5-2650 v2 processor and an initial configuration of 16GB of memory. You can see a comparison of the two processors here:
cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E5430-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2650-v2
We are also planning to migrate the forum and the rest of the GPWA website to a pair of load-balanced web servers, to improve performance, to avoid temporary disruptions for activities like the rebooting of servers, and to improve resilience to hardware failures.
Hopefully the new hardware will translate into our members experiencing a better performing GPWA website.
We don't yet have an estimated date for migrating the site to the new servers (actually, we don't yet know when the new servers will arrive so we can begin the installation and migration process). We will keep everyone updated as timeframes are determined.
Michael