johnm wrote: there are questions for the supplier to be answering.
The main one being, I'd suggest, is:
"What has changed that would account for the site being consistently about 10x slower than before all the buggering about with everything started?"
Given the lack of response on the performance issues, I'd be quite surprised if the issue was resolvable just by increasing the amount of memory available to a VM. Likewise, hopefully someone would know if a RAID disk had died and the whole thing was now limping along waiting for the next one to go...
It's quite odd... the forum used to be one of the fastest sites I use. Often a sub-second response time. Now literally an order of magnitude slower.
I'd be quite interested to see a diagram showing how the whole thing hangs together.