I am making copies of literally EVERYTHING involved with TWC. This means that at times I have to take various things offline, like the database. The goal here is to setup a sandbox that is an exact duplicate of TWC and start ripping stuff out to figure out what is causing our slow page speeds. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I have no way of predicting how long some of these things will take, so no way of predicting how long the site will be down or when I can do other steps.

When I am done there will be an exact copy of TWC located at sandbox.twcenter.net with new registration disabled. I am then going to rip out everything custom that TWC has ever had (all our hacks, plugins, skins, everything) and go back to a pure vanilla vBulletin install. Once that is done I will see what page load times are like (remember this is running on the same server so we should get a good idea of load) and start adding things back. When we find something that causes a performance issue then we will see if it can be tweaked to run faster or if it just gets nuked on the main site.

To get all this done I decided that a few hours of site interruption today would be worth the hassle of setting up a sandbox so I don't have to take TWC down every day while we tweak something here or there.

Customizing the sandbox will be a fairly long process since TWC has so many custom hooks, but in the end hopefully it results in a faster site. Everyone will be able to check the progress by visiting the sandbox site.