Help with a memory coding problem in a MUD?

Okay, well we all have our 'favorite' games, my favorite game made this really neat system... but it causes the game to critically hang and then crash.

As players, we've tried offering different possible solutions, but after 200 different ideas, over 6 years we are tapped, and the problem is unsolved. We are not coders, we are experienced players, and we want to help our DM find the right answer for our world.

It has to deal with how memory is dealt with and processed. Umm, we have places there your character can research the history of an area, by concentrating.

When this is done you get a little blurp on your screen telling you what you learned. You can retry as much as you want. The problem comes with storing memory, It's an old style MUD game circa 1996. So we have it remember something and send that message to a character. Umm after you do this about 10 times... the game literally hangs and then crashes because it was never meant to handle recalling that much information at one time.

Short or rebuilding the entire game system from the ground up, there appears to be no other available answer. As a player, I want to offer some better ideas and perhaps a solution than what I've seen so far.

As it's been explained, the game engine was never meant to handle more than 15 lines of text sending or received in a single moment. The typical history bit can pull between 1 and 70 lines of information in one minute. It's also grown very, very complex with hundreds of add-ons over the past 15 years.

It's okay when one character in the entire game world uses the system but when you have 20+ characters running around doing it, all at the same time it really 'breaks' the system data flow and program.

Causes the entire game to lag, first 1 second, then 30 seconds... then the game hangs and all 2500 players on the server get dropped, sometimes people lose everything they had right before the server went down.

The game system itself runs on counting, it counts every person, every dungeon monster, and every item within the game every 5 minutes, and doing so tracks where they were last and where they are now, what was created and what was destroyed.

I know the program could be just shut down, but I'm looking for alternatives, do you understand coding enough to offer some suggestions that might repair this situation?