So my experience today was a little different. I started a little earlier than the last few days, starting at around 1pm. It was a little slow, but nothing like the past few days. As I got closer to 2pm (now), it was getting more sluggish. Now I don't know if this is because I was making edits (which I find slows things down) or if it was growing traffic at that hour. All I know is I wanted to validate as much as possible before things got hairy.

It's misfiring for me at the moment - quick - slow - quick - stalled - splutters into life - stopped etc

Been tryin to work through a series all week and have lost count of the number of times I've had to abort.

Can't really spend the only short time available of my day waiting for ages every time I have to edit something. Sorry but I can't keep up with this anymore until it will be fixed.

Super slow today. I can't even log in. I was able to upload 1 movie today and 3 vehicles and that felt like it took forever. I even tried to get all of the images laid out ahead of time.

I've about 200 cars to add.

I'm glad I validated when I could

The problem is that I don't know what to do to fix it
I don't really know what cause the issue in the first place.
Maybe doing some structural changes in the database could help, but it takes time which I don't really have for the moment (probably a little more at the end of the month).
The quickest thing I could try would be to return an error 429 to the bots on times when the site is the slower, to see if it helps, as it seems to be the recommended solution, at least for Google).
Maybe I could try restarting the server, in the past it used to help but I'm not sure it will really do it this time, as the last restart was not that long ago.

Whatever you did today antp worked for me at least. I really did not have any trouble editing, or adding AKAs, or merging entries.

Right now I feel like I am the only one on the highway. Makes going thru the R171 a fairly easy task (almost completed. Going thru the 55 AMGs we have listed as some of the importer AMG Styling/AMG Sport Packages are mixed in with them).

Plus I was adding AKAs to other entries on the database.

Yes - last night was a lot easier for me too. Wasn't doing anything intensive, just updating, adding comments etc but much smoother with hardly any hiccups.

I did nothing yet
I really think it depends on the amount of people and bots.
Maybe it is the result of the change asked to Google the day before?

I'll try in priority to implement what I mentioned earlier which could be easy: sending an error 429 to bots between 7PM and 4AM CET, as it seems that these hours are the most problematic. Maybe having some kind of switch that admins could enable themselves to enable that feature when they notice that the site is slow, and which would switch off a few hours later automatically.
If it is not enough, I could limit some functions at these times, for example search in comment text which is quite heavy I think for the database.
I could check that in the next week.

For less easy fixes, main two ways to improve performance would be:
- to have a list of makes, and have each car linked to a make entry rather than having the make typed in a simple text field. It is on my to-do list since long time, in addition to performance increase the other advantage would be that there could be a page with info and links about the make (that admins could edit, like a special comment just for that page).
- comments linked to user ID rather than to a username, it would be easier for the server, the only downside is that comments from deleted users would appear as anonymous.
These would rather be for September, when I'll try to find some time.

The other things I have to finish first (as I started it) is the ability to block some movies pages so only admins can edit them. I hope to have time for it this month.

That's something I use a lot for checking IDs and details - where I think someone's said something useful a few weeks/months ago - and want to pull it up quickly and easily. Also for checking plate numbers for previous sightings particularly for serial offenders (eg police Wolseleys) or floaters. And when I'm not at home, so can't check books etc, but can retrieve comments from the site to fill the gap.

So please avoid limiting it if you can ....

Well it could become admin-only at these times too

Or what I could also do is to limit by default to last x months, with a link to search in the older posts if needed (that feature was done in the next version of the site - I should take the idea in the current site)

Same for the list of all posts by the users, most of the time only the last ones are needed, but it still has to compute the full list for the list of page numbers.

It's been fine past few days, but has turned slow in the last 15 minutes, just as I was finishing the first part of my recent works.

Don't know if the traffic is heavy today or if we have trawlers, but the site is slow this afternoon (14:25pm-EDT-US)

It has been fairly good since you did the reset last week.

I didn't do a reset last week in the end: I said I could try it, but the problem solved by itself before

Site seems really slow today

Extremely slow for me right now.

here too.. i had time to open another tab and read an article from the NHL website before the main comments page finally showed up

Admins will now see a link at the top of the page, near the link to user profile page, "Filter bots".
When you click on it, it enables for 2h the blocking of various bots on the site (if it was already enabled, it tells you, so you know that the issue is not due to bots...)
I hope it will help when the site is loaded.

It seemed to help for now, but there are so many different bots on the site today, that it is slow even before the usual peak hour. Maybe today was special bot day or something?

For sure that won't solve everything but it should already help a little, until I can improve the database structure.

Don't click it all the time As sometimes it is useful to have bots indexing the site.
But if the site stays slow for a few minutes while you are busy, at a point it is not useable (like Baube said in the above comment), then you can click on it and it may help the server breathing a little.