suggestion to lower load of forum

[DGMurdockIII]

im not sure if this will help but this might help with the forum putting stress on the you webhosting
memcached - http://danga.com/memcached/   is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

[ThomPhoenix]

SMF 2 and later has caching built-in. You have to configure the system properly though, by default it updates itself too often, causing more queries.

[Caarrie]

SMF 2 and later has caching built-in. You have to configure the system properly though, by default it updates itself too often, causing more queries.

but we are not running smf2 we are running 1.1.7

[ThomPhoenix]

Ah, time for an upgrade then!
I just realised 2.0 is still in beta.

[acraig]

Hopefully this should not be an issue any more.