In order to improve the performance of the AP forums, we are upgrading the forum database. This will address the key issue experienced by users, namely the database locking up and killing page loads while several concurrent searches and posts are performed.

Unfortunately there are two downsides - we have to take a brief outage of a couple of hours to make the change and we have to implement search using Google. However these compromises have been far outweighed by gains evidenced on similar upgrades performed on other IPC forums that have massively improved speed for all users.

The site will be down tomorrow morning (13 March 2008) for approximately two hours. The likely time for the forums to be down is 8.30 - 10.30.

Alex Robb
Publishing Director (IPC Media Inspire)