372086 VirtueMart Error Fix

The site is HoopTV.net. About a week or so ago we had a big event and the site was pounded with about 10k viewers at once who came to sign up for a pay-per-view event. The site crashed with an internal server error and the host ([login to view URL]) told us that we were running too many processes. We were never able to get the site back up and functioning during the event, but one of our long-time programmers analyzed the situation and came to the conclusion that the VirtueMart modules that were on the front page of the site (Featured Products and Latest Products) were making queries that were taking too much memory to process under heavy traffic. Given that the store has thousands of products in it, I'm not surprised by this. My gut instinct is to simply make any VM Modules on the front of the site static, rather than dynamic. This would eliminate queries. Beyond that, however, I need to do two things: (1) check the code of the entire site and ensure that it can handle heavy traffic. If there is anything that would result in heavy processes, we need to be advised how to resolve in the simplest manner. (2) fix the VirtueMart error that is now showing up in the admin area: [login to view URL] Right now we have a duplicate of the site that is on a dedicated server through hostgator. We believe this move was necessary to avoid the limits on processing both their shared hosting and VPS servers have. Once the development server is ready to go, we need to make sure the joomla content is synced between the live and dev server and then we'll do a DNS Switch. The deadline for this is December 16th, to give us time to ramp up for the December 21st tournament which will bring heavy traffic to the site once again.