Carolly, actually, without having physical or admin access, ( to check ) I would say that when the forums sow down it's from a combined cause. 1) over 2 thousand people online. 2) multiple concurrent requests to the server for forum postings. if 'rosity broke the forums into smaller databases, on separate machines, this would speed it up. poser, with say all the slowest forums. ( posts per day rating ) match so that each machine is getting roughyl same level of traffic. maybe the poser forum needs it's own machine. but with the forums getting pounded for views, and galleries getting pounded for views, it will slow the db server response, causing the lags we see. I've seen it go from zipping along to a crawl and back to zipping, some of which has to be site traffic, but some could be intenet traffic.