Reducing Queries
 

The host i can using for my forums is running extremely slowly, and it seems that the mysql database is causing this, so i was thinking on editing some of the files to drop some frontpage queries, what could i do to drop queries from the forumhome and threads

disable accessmasks.
disable showing who is online on forumhome

and with reducing some functionality:
replace forumhome with an static html page :D
reduce showthread functionality by replace it with tecks archive for example :)

there is a good link in erwins sig what could be changed too :)

is there anything else i can do inside the files, i hear that if you add the newer templates you havefrom other mods and hacks, in the top $templatesused part, that it reduces queries, but i don't know if there is any truth to it

Yes, you should do that, as the templates are then cached. All templates used should be in that section or else each template called is one extra query.

What I also did was remove my moderator column, and removed the query calling up the moderators, remove my total thread count (who cares - all people want to know is the total post count). You can also remove the search function or restrict it only for members, and remove forumjump (saves one query). Disabling avatars also would help.

well i've done that, but things are still slow for us, i guess it's just my host, they've just changed their mysql database and it's slow

Changing "mysql database" should not slow things down... do you mean change servers? Are you on a shared server? Maybe it's time to go dedicated.

yep, i think we're on a shared server, and we did want to go dedicated, but we don't have the money to do so

sometimes money is everything?!

my new dedicated server is alot faster than my old shared.