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Thanks for the suggestions. I don't dare remove any more images and attachments that's for certain. I remember the one user that complained (back when the sites were first switched over to a "professional" hosting firm) and I accidently removed attachments that were over 160 days old instead of 360 days old and I got an earful. Thanks to all that came to my rescue however, and there were many from my recollection.

I've been wondering however if archiving threads that havn't been active in xxx days would do me any good, I mean they would still be readable so they would could still constitute a read on the database table, but something else that has come to mind actually is to put some sort of limiter on thread post length. In the sense of saying xxx is the maxiumum amount of posts that can be in any one thread. So we don't get threads that have 300 messages in them because we all know what kind of chatty kathy's and chatty steves we can all be around here with our loose structure and how a thread might wander off into it's own little world for a while and add an extra 50 messages and then return to the subject at hand, then wander again and finally end up with 300 messages in it.

Yesterday I limited the amount of messages to show on each threads page to either 10 or 15 down from about 25 or 30, so that there wouldn't be so many sequential reads from the messages table for each page load, which should also make loading the pages a bit faster if the mysql server is bogged down. Interesting to me anyway, I found their mysql server heavily backlogged the other week which made me think it's purely the hosts ineptitude at running a hosting business that is causing the sites to be slower to load, produce time out errors etc, but they did acknowledge that the server was going through a backlog of requests that all came in at the same time, so it's not like they tried to deny anything.

There was one gal around here that runs her own hosting service and I'll bet she'd know what to do if I told her which stats are "extremely" high in the mysql server but she hasn't logged on here in ages. What was her name again? Hmmmm, she still might be listed as the mod for the Children of the Nile forums if I didn't remove her for inactivity which me being lazy is quite likely never to have happened.

All I do know is they tell me that the two items in question should normally show a reading of "0", and for our account it now shows 50M and 1256M which is huge and I can't imagine what is causing it unless it's been slowly building and building to the point it's at today and then adding 12 or 13 extra forums and doing extensive admin functions in them could have thrown it over the top in numbers. I'll have to see if she's still around and see if I can pick her brain a bit. At one time I offered to give her the CivCity: Rome website figuring she could host it, and it wouldn't cost her anything on her own servers and maybe even make some money from it, but never heard anything back, hmmmm go figure. She use to be real active too.

Anyway, let's see how this goes for now. Thanks again for the suggestions, you know when I ran these sites on my own server I had full resources of the system so it never bogged down, of course the couple (ahem, dozen or so, ahem) times that I managed to kick the electric plug out of the wall or our business class internet service went down was just about to kill me and the sites but we perservered, but going back to paying a bit more than double our current isp bill is a bit daunting at the moment. Oh well.... Lets see what happens with this. This might also be causing a backlog on the smtp server which might be why Lynkk got 10 activation messages all at once, for the mgf site. And I think the host runs the smtp and pop and web from the one server and the mysql from a seperate server, however at last count they've got something like 50 or more web servers which means just as many mysql servers too since they are not any fly by night organization. Where as I was able to run the web, smtp, pop and mysql on one server but when all the resources belongs to one base it's not hard to do.

Ok, chatty steve here signing off again.

Update MHBrands, that was/is her name.