I would be curious when backups of the database are run. Sunday evening is considered a good time for off hour backups for corporate America, but here in the rush to get that prized 21:00:59 timestamp... it is just the opposite.
another thought that might help with posting speed depending on what database is used (I doubt they are paying for an oracle license) is to purge old ads say everything over 6 months? I mean really are weekend lineup ads from 2010 helpful to anyone?
Originally Posted by Bob McV
Backups shouldn't really have too much of an impact on site performance unless I/O on the server is an issue. Only other instance I can think of would be during backups, assuming they're using MySQL, and the table holding posts is using MyISAM instead of InnoDB. This could cause a locking condition where the backup process locks the entire post table and prevents new rows from being entered. InnoDB offers row-level locking so it helps in circumstances like these.
All the techno-babble aside, I agree. Clearing out very old posts does seem like a good idea.