The shoutbox code and database table were updated to increase performance. Regarding general slowness, there is still a lot of unoptimized code killing performance. However, the shoutbox is loaded on every page and makes frequent queries, so it made for some good optimization.

Technical details:
- In the shoutbox table, changed columns of type int that only ever used two values to bit type and updated queries accordingly.
- Created a more effective concatenated index used by shoutbox queries.
- Changed queries on the shoutbox table that ordered by time (which wasn't indexed for some reason) to use the primary key instead, since the id and time are monotonically increasing.

EDIT: To give credit where it's due, shout out to Ashamed for some advice and motivation.

EDIT 2: For a sense of scale, on a four-hour uptime, shoutbox refresh requests made up just over 27.99% of requests to the site according to the access logs.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 10 2017, 2:36 am by Mini Moose 2707.