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I'm seeing periodic slowdowns in my Microsoft Access driven site

With random website slowdowns the usual culprit is the Microsoft Access database, which was never intended for use on the web.  It works perfectly fine on small sites and has the advantage of being easy to set up and work with, but it absolutely does not scale.  Most common issues are:

•   •  The MS Access database is unmaintained and in need of a "compact & repair" operation to get it back in trim.  This should be done every month on a moderately busy site, but is easy to forget and can be a somewhat hazardous undertaking if done incorrectly.
•   •  The MS Access database has become overly large, we recommend not using Access at all when you start to approach 10,000 products.
•   •  The website suffers malicious bot activity that results in masses of complex queries being sent to the database, causing an execution backlog.  Viewing your logs will confirm if that's an issue in your case.

In all cases the best solution is to upsize to Microsoft SQL Server. That's an industrial strength database platform that's designed to handle the biggest sites. You can do that yourself or we can handle it for you.  MySQL/MariaDB is also a possibility.