Restarted the database service to change a setting, it may be slow for a few minutes.
By default it uses 128 MB for the cache of the InnoDB tables (the new format used), but that server has 32 GB memory with 75% unused, so it should make use of all that memory

I unlocked the changes, I hope it will work fine now, we'll see how it behaves compared to before when the site has some load due to the bots.

The "all comments" page seem slow when going to the older pages, but that's maybe something that has not much interest anyway: only recent pages are useful there, I assume that nobody browse that beyond the pages of the last few days.

Maybe I should simplify the pagination there and remove the pages after the "..." as it is not useful to see that there are more than 60k pages of comments anyway

I'll switch back the vehicle table to the old system, as it seems to have performances issues. I'll investigate that later.
Keeping the comments table with the new structure, as it was the one causing more slowness.

At the same time, I'm also updating the https certificates, as it was still using those from the old server, which expire within 2 weeks. There should not be visible change for that, but again if you notice something, don't hesitate to report it here.

I had to force restarting the database service, it seems to be OK now, I re-enabled the site, but I'm keeping the site read-only for some time (one hour or so) to be sure all works.
Please reporting anything strange that you notice (if you notice that all seems OK after browsing the site for some time, you can report it too).

It takes longer than expected. On the test database the last step only took a few seconds, on the real database it is busy since several minutes, I don't know what it is doing...
(I took a backup before all of that, just in case, so I can always recover everything from that)

I'll soon disable the site for a few minutes, to change something in the database to try to solve the issue of delay when posting new comments at peak times.

edit: maintenance in progress

For static smilies they could be uploaded like comment pictures, but for animated ones indeed there is no solution. I should maybe add some smiley some time

That's okay

The current active site that has smacking to the forehead:

Maybe we need our own smacking to the forehead

I should maybe have kept the original smiley name for easier replacement. If you search on the text I mentioned earlier in your old comments, you can still find all the smilies to replace