-First get 62,000 members
-put them all on a p-3 800 with 512 megs of ram
-watch as your forum slowly shrivals up and dies :(

well thats where i am today hopefully tomorrow i can write the "how to revive a VBulletin 1.1.4 that died " thread
my plan is to up the CPU to a 933 and scsi-fy the machine (its currently running udma 66 drives) and other thoughts?

Steve

Ouch. Not the first time I've heard this story...

I'm considering a larger-scale board, so I will look forward to the tale of your travail; and, one hopes, a happy resolution of it.

steve what you need is the vB support forums

- MySQL forum
http://vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=18
- Server config forum
http://vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=14

and my sig (don't worry a vB joke)
http://vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=3452

is the mysql database on the same server or a dedicated mysql server + a web server ?
how many concurrent users are on the forums ?
what version of php and mysql are you using ?
zend optimiser installed ?
are you using mysql default settings ? you may need to tweek them.. max connections, key_buffer and table_cache settings...

of course, i am no expert, just had alot of experience tweaking my forums - http://animeboards.net/forums/index.php

Have you done much analysis to see where the bottleneck is occuring?

I'm betting the switch to some good, fast SCSI drives (like Cheetahs) would help. If the machine is getting any significant drive activity, IDE can bring an otherwise fast server to its knees.

Going to SCSI drives will definetly help lower your CPU usage. An increase in RAM would also help substantially.