The server host company has fixed the speed issue, I found out it occurred after the server host company *did* a reboot of our server last night following a security threat found in RedHat Enterprise Linux's glibc packages. They had to patch that and reboot and apparently the speed loss occurred about the time I was doing the gallery change, which I thought was the problem.
The speed is restored now but please be advised that our server may have to reboot again later today. (After which they will ensure it stays fast this time.)
After the reboot yesterday they also noticed that our server had a broken hard drive, one of the two hard drives was completely wrecked. Luckily, we had RAID1, that is a system with double hard drives where one drive mirrors the other to prevent data loss in case of a hard drive failure.
We were operating on a single drive, they replaced the broken drive, and will restore the RAID1 array later today so that both drives will be in-sync again, giving us the protection that saved the entire website from being destroyed by the one failing drive.
It payed off to have that RAID1 system with two hard drves...
Also tomorrow the coding expert will try to finish getting the new gallery fixed and other coding issues resolved.
