DB overclocked to critical system failure indeed

[Mr Al Beebe]

Your database must be quite big with all the posts. How does the size effect the performance of this website. Its quite noticable. - AL

[Nat Fairbanks]

The database is actually quite small compared to larger phpBB2 based sites at just under 100MB in the mysql database. As an example, phpbb.com, the homepage of the software, has a forum with over 1.5 million posts and almost 200,000 users. Merrimackforum.org runs on a shared web host with many other sites, and any slowness you see could also be caused by heavy load on one of those sites. Even then I rarely have seen what I would consider significant slowness on this site. I have run phpBB2 on some very very "weak" hardware, including a sparcserver 5 @ 110Mhz and a Buffalo Linkstation with a 266Mhz G3 processor. The one feature that does seem to take up a fairly significant amount of resources is the "Search" function, but that's a fairly uncommon operation.

-Nat