The CIT site is back online after a few tweaks to improve the MySQL database performance. First, the character set of the database had to be converted to match the character set of the web server. After that (a mere 166 SQL commands…), there was an error in the logs of the web server, a message kept appearing saying, “MySQL server has gone away.”  After some research, a fix was found here. Performance improved significantly after these two fixes, but there were still occasional pauses when accessing the site. After watching the running processes on the server, I noticed that the hald-addon-stor service was eating up a lot of CPU and memory periodically, and causing a noticeable slowdown. After still more research, I came across this bug report on Ubuntu, and was able to fix the problem. All in all, a tough problem to troubleshoot, but hopefully one that will fix the performance problems for good.