Do you have 75,000+ posts? Slow page loads? Solution!

[ZacFields]

So I tried this today and this seems to have worked out pretty well.

First off, a little history for you guys. My site is a local area car forum. When we first started out, we had a member who was really great and became everyone's friend. After about 9 months of the site being up, he died of Cystic Fibrosis. So I COULD NOT lose the posts he made from when he was alive. It was vital that they be preserved.

But my pageloads on my site were just getting pretty hefty. On the new server they were much better, but still way too much. During peak times we're talking 3-5 second page loads. A lot better than 5-30 second page loads but still not good enough.

I took a backup of the database and created a second forum on my server using the backup. So now I have an archive of my website running.

Then I came back to my original site and pruned the posts from 105,000 down to about 10,000 posts. Bingo, pages load around 1.5-2.5 seconds peak now.

Just imagine a barrell full of 104,999 red jelly beans and 1 green jelly bean somewhere in there, and you have to stick your hand in there and find that red jelly bean as fast as you can. Then imagine how much easier it would be to find that 1 red jellybean if there were only 9,999 green ones in there. It would be faster, eh? That's the way I rationalize that.

Does anyone have any database optimizing tips? I still think 1.5-2.5 seconds on a VPS is still too much. I just loaded a brand new Integramod up for a friend on a shared host and he's getting 0.30 second pageloads. Is my 1.5-2.5 second pageloads normal?

Zac