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Our servers rotate registration. Generally the registration server is the most stressed server at the time. It doesn't really matter which machine from s1-s15. It is entirely depedent on the amount of users registering boards and the activity on those boards. In addition, there can be additional stress if any of those boards are victim to an attack by malicious or disgruntled users. What you may feel as a small slow down or slow load for a few minutes can at times be the result of the server successfully fending off an attack by another party. Other times, it can just be the time it takes to process requests when creating a large amount of new boards.

When a server becomes full, we move registration to the next empty server. At that point, the server tends to settle down as it is no longer processing registrations and performance is normally much more stable. I noticed one person asked why this board rarely goes down. It used to back when it was the only server. Once registration went to the next server, this one settled down and became much more stable. Back in 2003/2004 when server 1 was the only server and we were running on older machines, we would frequently be plagued by database errors and down time for an hour or so. Sometimes longer. As the service has grown and new, better machines were bought, the annoyance of downtime has been drastically reduced and is generally more or less occasional slow load times as opposed to hours of actual down time.

One reason why registration servers have not changed as often as they once did is because about a year ago, all servers were moved to newer, faster machines with much more space. This allowed us to reopen old 'full' servers as well as gave us more space for existing servers. Once these fill up, we'll move on to the next empty server.