Archiving Old Posts (or Other Ways to Speed Forums)

[ShannonA]

Our forums have just gotten plain too big. They now contain 4.7M posts and 220k threads.

Increasingly the board is getting laggy. We finally turned search off a few months ago because any use of search locked the board for a few minutes. Now, just sheer number of people continues to make the board lag. In the 500-1000 simultaneously active users range the MySQL processes sometimes back up till they hit their limit (~800) and everything hangs.

Now I presume at least one of the problems is the grossly large "post" table which is now 2.9G in size. When I did the upgrade to v3.5 yesterday, the changes to the post table took about 20 minutes each and timed out the upgrade script each time.

So, is there anyway to archive older posts to bring the size of the post table down?

Or, are there any suggestions for improving response time via other methods. This is if anything more improtant now because v3.5 seems to have made the problem worse.

vBulletin: 3.5 gold
MySQL: 3.23
PHP: 4.1.2

Shannon