Really ? My forum is so tiny it never was an issue

Was that
in addition to the queries added by vBpager ?
I will look into making it less resource intensive. Meanwhile there are a couple of things you can do:
- Set the pager refresh limit to a higher amount. Mine refreshes every 300 seconds or 5 minutes.
- Take the vbPager code out of the navbar and footer templates and put it on FORUMHOME instead (but that takes away the assurance that users will now they were paged within minutes of the page).