I'm now in the process of tweaking the code to speed up the site. While most of the loading times are due to the fact that YWS is on a shared server, some of the loading times are due to a lot of queries being passed back and forth between the site and the database. To reduce all that, I'm caching a lot of those queries for any pages that take the server more than a second to generate.
For most of the pages on YWS, the server generates the page in .5 seconds. But it used to take the server up to 7 seconds to generate the front page. I managed to reduced that to just .3 seconds with caching. But what that means is that stuff will not be instantly updated on the front page. That is, it may take a while for something new (such as a new post) to show up on the front page. But I think that's a small price to pay for lower loading times.
In any case, I think I may move the site to a new hosting provider, such as hostway. The current provider is Yahoo Small Business, and I'm not happy with it. The server speed is inconsistent, I can't send out newsletters, and the server is unreliable. Hostway has a much better reputation, and I'm hoping that if I move the site over there, YWS would run a lot faster.
