Ok, so here's my write up on everything that's going on.
The Problem
We're too big for our britches here, ultimately. The current host requires that the database stays below 750mb. This is for one main reason (and several sub reasons):
We are on a shared server.
Hondo's is hosted on a machine with (likely) several other sites. Whatever operations we're running must take a "fair" amount of resources.
I could get into deep theory here, but basically, to do things concurrently, the server has to split each task into "chunks" and process them one after the other. If we have too many "chunks", or too many that are a higher priority, things get tough for the other people on the server.
If we're running too many high priority tasks, we dominate the server, and the hosting company starts shutting stuff down.
Large databases cause problems (in general):
Everything you do on here is a query to the database (sometimes more than one at a time). If you post something, it queries the database to figure out where to put the post (topic, forum, etc.), and all the other information associated with it (author, time, etc).
Just because something was done recently (for example, this post, when I'm done, will be the most recent post on the forum), doesn't mean it's able to found immediately by the query (it would likely return all the other posts in this topic first).
So, all posts and users are essentially related to each other in some form or fashion. The larger the database gets, the longer it takes to get from Point A to Point B
Traversing the database takes system resources:
I think you can see where I'm going here. The longer it takes to get from Point A to Point B, the more processing power it uses. Of course, because everything works this way for us, that's a fairly high priority task and...causes everything else to slow down for everyone else.
Now, the fun part. Remember how I said the limit is 750mb? Currently we're sitting at 2,622.18mb. That's...that's a pretty big problem. To be fair, part of that is as a result of the upgrade. The forum software makes a copy of several of the tables within the database to act as backups in the event that something goes wrong. For whatever reason (probably because it's hard for the software to tell if something went wrong), it retains those backups after the upgrade is complete.
Even if we deleted those backups (which is not a problem), it really only saves us about 700mb or so, which isn't anywhere close to what we need to be. Ideally, we could save another ~400mb by deleting the search cache table, but that would all but disable the fancy new search function, which would be stupid because that STILL wouldn't bring us below the limit.
I only recently gained access to the cPanel, so I don't know how long this has been a problem, but I would venture to guess that it has been for a while now. I have no idea why they are just now bitching about it, the database just doesn't go over the limit by that much overnight.
The Solution?
Honestly, I'm not sure outside of what Nick has suggested. This is one of those that you can throw money at and fix, but I'm not sure how feasible that is in the long run. Another option is making an offline archive of old posts, but without starting fresh, it really wouldn't come close to fully fixing the problem, which kind of defeats the purpose.
The solution to this one is less technical than I'm used to.
Other Notes
Upgrades to the software are, generally, a good thing. Keep out the baddies and get new features here and there.
A 5gb file limit might seem small, but there was easily 600mb of crap just sitting around the server that I was already able to clean out (including a database backup from 2014).
I have started a poll suggesting that a Hondo's Patreon be started to handle monthly donations directly to Nick. I would gladly help throw in some if I could just set it up and forget about it.
