It's a dedicated beefy machine just for the forums. The original plan was to develop forum software all our own, but vB gets such great reviews we thought we'd give it a try.
Changing the MySQL options is possible, but it's not a long term solution, since it's set pretty high already. It seems like the datastore table is holding ALL of the existing forums as a serialized object. That's cacheing a lot of unnecessary stuff IMHO

.
I guess I can rewrite the cacheing - it'll be easier than writing all new forum software.
Some other forum software could handle the # of forums, but got extremely slow... So, we'll see.
Thanks!
-steve