In preparation for the migration to the new stats db, we have been doing some profiling on the stats db to see where we can get the most speed up. We have found a few items that we're working on to increase speed. The hardware improvement will make the biggest advantage in general, but now is a good time for us to try to get the stats system lean and efficient, since profiling afterwards will be harder (and any efficiencies we can squeeze out will help years from now when the new hardware is underpowered for the new stats load).
So, from the donor perspective, you will at first see the results of some experimenting on our side to improve the throughput (i.e. may be some bugs too), but hopefully there will be some throughput benefits even in the short term.
Finally, we have noticed that there are many web clients pounding our stats system, some doing 10,000 accesses per day and many doing 1,000. These IPs will be banned, so please turn off any scripts you have doing automatic access. "Normal" access is assumed to be up to 50 accesses a day. There's no need to do 1,000 or more and it really bogs down the stats for everyone else.
If you're looking to get access to our stats system, please check out our FAQ entry on this issue.
UPDATE:
We've turned off certain stats page functions dealing with queries relating to the number of CPUs. We have also stepped up the caching of team pages (all team pages are cached for 60 minutes). This will make a major performance win in the stats db and so far is looking to help a lot.
So, in fields which we are temporarily not showing on the web page, you will see a N/A.
This change is temporary since the cause is clear: our db keeping track of items like specific cpus is way too big, due to the millions of CPUs that have participated in FAH. This won't be a problem with the new servers, so we will just turn on these features after we migrate. For now, turning off this parts of the stats pages will help a lot until we switch over.