So, over the Christmas break our lovely tech team did a lot of work on our server to improve response time. The server used to have an average response time of around 350ms (that’s actual processing time), our pages would then take approximately 4-5 seconds before being visible on the user’s browser and then would take another few seconds to finish loading other elements of the page in the background.
We have managed to reduce our server average response time to just under 200ms and the user will now typically see the page with 2-3 seconds, with the other elements loading in the background a few seconds afterwards.
At the same time we have also split the load onto multiple servers to handle peak traffic periods a lot better.
So, the good news is, the upshot of all this fiddling that we are confident that we can re-instate the 1000 messages per page feature without impacting site performance. We'll do that this week some time.