Progress update.
I've done about all I can software-wise to speed things up. Performance seems acceptable but there's little, if any headroom (spare capacity), and definitely not enough to make full-text search realtime during market hours.
We're tentatively scheduled to take the new database server to the ISP Wednesday evening. There might be very brief interruptions of service as we move all of the database boxes to onto a new gigabit switch with new Cat6 cables, but those should be so brief that few if any will see any outages. The new switch is needed so we can speed up db-to-db file transfers ten-fold to move everything to the new box. The 10/100 mpbs limits we're currently cruising at is more than enough for websever/db communications and will remain at that speed for now.
After Wednesday evening, expect outages of up to an hour or so at a time (only at night) as we do test-moves of the databases onto the new box and test its functionality. The outages should be pretty infrequent until the last one, when we shut off access to the old box, copy the data one last time, then fire everything back up on the new boxes. Definitely the new db box and hopefully the new webserver too. For reasons we have yet to uncover, the new webserver doesn't play well with the current database box. It's making more connections to the database box than the current machine does, and overwhelming it only in quantity of connections; not workload.
Initially only the Investors Hub database will reside on the new box. Eventually, Silicon Investor will be moved and the current Silicon Investor database box will be set up as a "mirror", meaning it'll have a realtime copy of everything the new box has and can seamlessly become the production machine in case of any failure. This will give both sites an added realtime layer of redundancy, which we've never needed, but is always comforting to have.
