As you may have noticed, the site looks a little different. After taking a hard look at the layout, it was obvious to me that the header was an incredible waste of space so I rearranged all of the elements that they now take up about half the space as before. I killed the lame login and messaging icons and also moved the login / logout / register stuff to the header to get rid of that awkward login/register statement beneath the secondary navigation. I still have to work out a few kinks on the repurposing of that section though so it stays for now.
The biggest change is under the hood in the form of my cache implementation.
The performance of the site has been atrocious. This is partially because it resides on a server that is well into virtual memory due to physical memory constraints and over allocated in terms of web applications that it serves. Regardless, this is the hand that I have to play with right now so I had to figure out how to work around it.
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