Hi,

That is a strange symptom. I certainly have not heard of it before and have never experienced it in any of my sites

The only ideas I have are:

1. databases don't automagically recover free space if a table gets lots of data and then later the data is deleted it does not automatically free up the space. You can do some googeling on this to learn more, there are some ways to manually recover the free space in some cases.
2. given the above, the only tables which I can think of for features included in mojoPortal that might grow and grow under some circumstances would be mp_IndexingQueue and mp_TaskQueue which could get populated with data and then somehow if the task to process and remove those rows doesn't happen it could just build up lots of rows. Maybe also if you are using WebStore the mp_PayPalLog and mp_GoogleCheckoutLog could potentially grow more than expected.
3. If you have other custom features that create a lot of data, or other apps creating data in the same database
4. If you have my product In Site Analytics Pro installed and configured to capture data, it is a great deal of data and would grow very quickly. This product can be configured to use a different database than mojoPortal because it does use so much space.
5. I think you need to look into which tables are very large (lots of rows) and go from there

I would not use AppKeepAlive unless the slowness is caused by lack of traffic, otherwise it doesn't help anything, it just keeps your site from falling asleep, if your site gets continous traffic it is not asleep.

Hope that helps,

Joe

I found it to be on most of the mp_{tablename} and not on the custom tables that i'd created.

You found what specifically on what specific tables?

You have the database on a separate VM machine from the web site, does it connect to the VM by a local network or doe sit connect over the internet? Connecting over the internet would be slow.

Is the web site on a VM? How much power does the VM have in terms of processor and memory. You need at least 1 GB of RAM on a VM for a Web Server and ideally at least 2GB or the machine does not have enough head room for running IIS etc and that will make it slow. With a VM with 2GB of RAM you could install SQL Express on the same machine and it "should" run ok, but remember that with a VM the real hardware is shared by multiple VMs and if there are too many of them on the same real hardware they will not perform well.

You will get better performance using inexpensive shared hosting than using an underpowered VM.

I can tell you that this site runs on a dedicated server with a good processor and 2GB of RAM and it is very fast with about 9 different sites running on the same machine and we have both SQL Server and My Sql also running on the same machine. We get a lot of traffic and we could handle a great deal more traffic than we get.

Best,

Joe