I have processed the Logs and released assorted quotes of the here:
>>>/4irc/478
Here is what went on:
Null joined the 8chan-dev team under the handle n-tech for reasons that are still a mystery to me although I read almost all chatlogs concerning Infinity Next and had personal contact with him over IRC. First of all, Vichan which is based on Tinyboard has a problem with I/O. It needs a ludicrous numbers of hard drives to serve as many people as 8chan does.
Null made the site stats module for Infinity back in last Spring and thus gained HW's trust. This resulted in him picking Null's Larachan over the 4 other offers for a vichan rewrite. Over the Summer, everything was quiet but there were two obvious pitfalls that became apparent during the early phase: CPU load due to Larachan being dynamic and speed, because it was developed with a slow script language and a slow frame work on top of that. Null managed to fall into both pitfalls during the late beta. Before the beta even started, there was a huge Misunderstanding, because Codemonkey tried to make Jim offer Null a better deal in form of Job that pays well, but Jim thought that Null wanted to sell the software to him. Shortly later, HW worked that out, without Null presence. Null still refused all Job offers.
Now we come to the beta phase that came way too early, the very time were everything collapsed. Infinity had issues with speed since late August, because the historic record kept by the site stats module grows linearly and reached a point where the servers couldn't handle it. That wasn't known at the time. HW only noticed it so quickly on January 29, because he was working on a Frontend Controller for Vichan. Eitherway, it became so severe, that Hotwheels sped up the process. The vast majority of the userbase saw Larachan for the first at the start of the beta and were extremely unhappy with the design. After most blockers were gone, the first migration attempt came around Christmas. It failed, because Larachan's data model couldn't keep up with the dataset. On New Year's Eve came the second attempt. It failed, because Larachan couldn't deal with the CPU load. A week of fuddling with all kinds configs later, it turned out that 2ch's machines were too weak to handle it. In fact, any machines has problems with handling next, because it needs so much CPU. The last chance was applying Varnish for caching but that went against Null's vision, HW keeping all Options open has upset him too much and the stress has already eaten his sanity. What followed was one last meltdown in the 8chanstaff channel.