In all fairness, NGDF has gotten significantly slower lately at times. Other times it flies along like its old self. Based on what I can tell so far, it seems to be three core causes - significantly increased traffic, some stupid configuration choices that make it choke a bit under load (which I'm in the process of tuning for better performance - things should be better today), and my hosting company stacking more load on the physical server that underlies the virtual server that NGDF runs on.

NGDF is big enough now that it doesn't fit on any sort of "shared" hosting plan. We were running against the limits of this before Don's passing, and so it was a bit of a blessing in disguise that I had to migrate it. It was in the works anyway, and that just accelerated things.

I've made a few changes last night and this morning that should improve performance. At some point I probably will move NGDF to newer, bigger hardware, but I'm hoping to put that off until this winter when work slows down and I have my father's estate all wrapped up. If performance starts bogging again even after some tuning, then we'll look at moving that up to a sooner date.

As far as the donation button, I removed it when Don passed away since it went to Don's account. I haven't put it back yet. It's half out of laziness, but it's also just because life's been pretty good to me so far and it's not really a financial hardship to keep the lights on. It's more about finding the time these days. I appreciate everyone's desire to contribute, and I may put it back at some point in the future, but for now don't worry too much about it. Or buy me a beer next time you run into me in NG country.