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Print ArticleGreat news everyone; after weeks (if not months!) of stress, I received an answer : apparently, the CIHR thinks that my project is worth funding, and granted me a doctoral award!
I received some emails this week of people complaining about some pages loading sloooooowly; we got Fark'ed; twice! Which means massive traffic, and it was a little hard on the server.
I'm working on ameliorating the design, but honestly, I think i could use some help! We'll see what the next iteration looks like; don't hesitate to drop me comments / emails about things to improve, feedback is always appreciated.
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Congratulations on your success! I hope this doesn't mean you're done with this site now that you have your Doctorate...
With regards to the Farking, part of the problem is that the main page is dynamically generated. If you could either put in a caching server (like squid) or rewrite your application (phpbb?) to write to an html file instead of the screen, you would cut down on the load on your server.
With the squid solution, you move your website to a different port or ip address, and setup a copy of squid to run where your website used to run, programmed to look at the real website.
The other solution relies on the fact that html files 'cost' less than php files, cpu-wise. However, since you're using off-the-shelf software, customizing it like that is probably not something you want to learn how to do.
Thanks, but I don't have my doctorate yet!
I got federal funding for it (I started about a year ago). Still, its great news 
And don't worry about customization; most of the php code is mine, and I'm modifying Movable type a bit too; I'm just bad at designing website (visually), that's it! 
I think the Fark-induced slowness had to do with 2 images on the "whales in egypt" press release. Of course, lots of php code don't help. And the fact that I'm on a non-dedicated server (I share hosting with many, many websites) too.
I was unaware of Squid as a solution for caching; I'll look into that. I was about to implement dynamic generation of individual archives with caching to reduce the load but it doesn't play well with the phpBB comments integration
Thanks for the support, and don't worry about the site's future, I'm quite dedicated to it! As long as Fark attract 10k uniques per day...
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