Wayne, This is WAY out of my area of expertise, but I seem to have noticed a degradation in the forums (but NOT the catalog, i.e. the revenue generator :) ) shortly after you gave everyone the tip about bumping their max IE "concourrent HTTP/TCP connections". I'm not saying it is, but could that have "changed the dynamics" of delivering the data and created a new "bottleneck" for your server(s). From my perspective, the performance of the forums has been superb over the past few years, but for the past month or so, at best, it's been kind of slow, and many times the pages just time out. For me, it went from great, to "sucky", and imo "something" changed the performance dynamics in a relatively short time period. I'm not complaining, just pointing out what my experience has been. I don't know what tools you have available, but a "bottleneck" this severe should be detectable without throwing hardware, software upgrades, etc. into the mix without determining the "real" cause. But I'm sure you already know that :)

It's 100% a software issue with MySQL - not a hardware issue. Disk times and CPUs are all extremely low - it's a problem with the way MySQL full-text seach works. I have some solutions in mind...

-Wayne

Of that, we had no doubt :)! Just out of curiousioty (heck, I might accidently learn something), do you know why the "MySQL full text" issue became such a bottleneck in such a short time? I understand how system performance can degrade rapidly once you hit the "knee of the curve", but is that what brought on the "sudden" degradation?

Told you MySQL was a dog... with limitations.

Install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on a new server and then dump the data from MySQL to the SQL Server... via backup/restore or through data transformation services. Then point your BBS product to the new SQL Server... leaving your old MySQL server intact as a backup in case you have some problems or kinks to iron out on the cutover.

You'll see exponentially better performance.

-Troy