[taylor_smith]

Greetings! Our server load has been pretty high lately. I'm hoping to learn more about relying on archives for old content.

We're using an old version of vBulletin with lots of custom coding that has been passed around to various servers, suffered some crashes, changed management, been infected with iframes, survived DDoS attacks, etc. Furthermore, lots of the data was imported from other end-of-life software, as the community has been open for 13 years. In sum, we've seen better days.

So, the auto-archive feature seems to be doing it's job to an extent, but when I try to open specific posts, I'm redirected to the live site. See here: vboards.stratics.com/archive/index.php. Should we prune really dated threads and rely on the archive to lighten the server load? Will doing so make it harder to migrate to a new forum software in the future?

By the way, when I recently attempted to migrate to a new software, I keep exhausting out memory. We allocated all 8 gb of server memory and were still running out. Also, the migration was running very slowly. Anybody know why this might be?