I finally upgraded php from 5.6 to 7.2
The forum was designed for php7
So it should help.
But I had to fatfinger all the settings so let me know if something broke or started to work.
Still trying to find a easy way to block all the countries attacking the site which slows it down.
Do you happen to have geo filtering or something on the firewall protecting the sites connection?
I have done that using cloudflare because the host did not provide blocking by country.
It was to labor intensive to manually block ip ranges in htaccess.
I was over 37,000 rows of ip ranges that update monthly.
It is somewhat under control now.
