thread with 100,000+ replies very slow

[tmc]

Those are all verbs, TECK.. Still should be rise. "______ of a new giant" requires a noun, and the only common use of "raise" as a noun is "pay increase". But I really don't care, just thought it was odd you came in this thread just to post the definition of raise.

@ the OP:

But I definitely wanted to give my +1 to nginx. Litespeed is simply too expensive, and Lighttpd is unstable (so I hear), slower (usually), and not as fully featured as nginx. And of course if you're talking about the free version of Litespeed, nginx still wins, IMO. Converting all your .htaccess code isn't too hard either. I would say I prefer nginx in that regard anyway. Doesn't bog your server down by looking for a .htaccess file in every single directory back to the web root..

Nevertheless, that's really not going to help you with your large thread problems. You discussed a simple enough solution, and that's auto-closing big threads.

And this bit simply isn't true, sadly:

Like I said though, most everything I'v read said thread length shouldn't effect load times (even though I too noticed a clear difference), and I visit other forums that are more active and have longer threads. I was hoping to find a workaround or tips on optimizing my server/database to handle these types of situations.

Every "large" thread I've ever come across has 1+ second load times, no matter what the server configuration is.