If the whole system was slow, I could understand the RAM issues. And I did have them go up from 4 gig to 5 gig. Plus I have another 3 gig virtual. But I just can't see it's a RAM issue. Everything is fast everywhere. Everything in all my aspects of my site are fast.
And 3GB of page file (virtual memory) which is Hard Drive based.
Something seems wrong with this server scenario.
"5GB" is a strange number for installed memory on a server-class system in 2015.
Considering the size of your forums and the SQL/PHP/APACHE... and other services you may be running at the same time;
As of April 28, 2015:http://forums.bellaonline.com/ CATEGORIES: 400+
TOPICS: 105,780+
POSTS: 740,778+
USERS: 57,614
I'm going to take a rough guess here, but your MySQL Disk Space is probably at least 1GB just for your forum alone, with your POSTS table being about 90% (900MB) of that.
I've been a developer for over 20 years
If you're not letting your Windows Server 2012 automatically control your page file (virtual memory), at least match it to the same amount of physical memory you have installed on it. Though, dating back to Windows NT 4.0, for the past 20 years (since mid 1996 IIRC), the common recommendation when manually managing a page file is to make the page file 1.5 times the size of the installed RAM. Although Windows Server will allow you to operate without a paging file, this is not recommended since you may lose unwritten cached data and log files in the event of a power fault.
As a side note; Is your server using a 5400 RPM HDD or is it 7200 RPM? The slower the HD, the slower your system will be when it interacts with that page file no matter what positive size you have it set to. This will also affect your SQL queries.
Some forum interactions get cached (TOPIC VIEWS and SEARCH RESULTS in the DB, WHOSONLINE in RAM). Some interactions are heavy on the DB and dont get cached for obvious reasons. Though searches do get cached in the DB through RAM, any two people searching for identical keywords are rare. Searches on massive databases will cause some forum servers to completely halt until the search limit is reached or the query is has completed on the whole post DB. Another time when a forum may grind to a halt until the process is completed is when a new post is created (or one is edited) that causes the TOPIC_VIEWS table to update the TOPICS table.
If your forum has very little RAM or is running on slow hardware/drives, new posts/replies will be delayed for as long as it takes for the server to write out the TOPIC_VIEWS table to the TOPICS table. The duration of that delay will vary depending on if a lot of topics have been viewed between the said post/edit.
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You also previously mentioned that on your prior servers (through a different hosting company), you had some custom php.ini settings that you did not backup when you moved over to your new server is hosted at.
Were you also running PHP 5.5 on that prior host? or was it PHP 5.3/5.4?
Are you using a different version of MySQL now?
How much memory did you have installed with that host? What was the page file size you had then?
If you did not change the scripts that you're using, but you did change the services or the hardware configurations, what are those differences?
Again, as James/Gizmo previously stated -
At this point, since it's more than likely a server resource issue, and that's outside the scope of user to user support on the forums, I'd advise contacting your host/data center regarding server tuning and recommendations on their end.
