I have been running the YAF forum for a while now, through various versions and it is reasonably popular (see stats below). The site and the forum are hosted in a shared environment (can't afford dedicated server) and use the same DB. The forum is definitely the most popular part of the web site. Issues started when we first moved to a new host - sessions would timeout constantly, the whole DB would be down, and then we started getting these lovely messages how our performance is impacting other users.

Then they started "restricting our account" until we take "action to optimize the performance and implement pooling". They would do that (restrict account) without telling us first, meaning no one can update what is happening (we are following a european football club) due to that. Pooling was done, but no improvement. So we shifted to DiscountASP. I like them, but our app is constantly being recycled, after maybe a minute. So, you can't even finish typing a shortest of the messages, the session will end.

Very frustrating.

Anyway, the question is: should I implement Sql Server Session state, I know it is slower than inProc, but at least users could use the forum? Does it have to be on a different DB or can I use the same (I don't want to shell another $10/month, which I don't have)? Is there anything that can be done to make it work smoothly in a shared environment?

Please help.

Forum version 1.9.3 (full)

ASP.NET 2.0

Sql Server 2008

Number of posts: 86,451 Posts per day: 169.18

Number of topics: 746 Topics per day: 1.46

Number of users: 1,637 Users per day: 3.20 (ignore this, we just moved to the server a day ago)

Board started: 12/16/2007 (511 days ago) Size of database: 156 MB