This morning's maintenance of the AW database went well. We have about 1.1 million pages of content, which took several hours to scrub down. The database came out of the procedure, with a couple of nicks soothed and a clean bill of health.

Unfortunately, there still seems to be a big bug with image uploading. Even I can't load an image into my gallery without getting the timeout error. The way the database chugs on the attempt to upload an image for several minutes means that people uploading images across the site might be dragging the database down for the duration of the attempts.

I hope that by attending to this image upload bug, we can also solve the slow response time issues. I will be tracking the bug for the next couple of days to see if there is an obvious and easy solution. If not, then I will begin the long over-due revamp of the image gallery system May 15. After this overhaul (which should not be intrusive to other parts of the site), we should have finally put to rest the other bugs related to the image gallery including the dreaded storage quota problems.

Through the summer I will also be reconfiguring the structure of the database to distribute records from the large 1.1 million record table to several smaller tables based on content type, such as board posts, images, and homesites. After this overhaul the site should be snappier.

Thanks for bearing with us through all this!