lately we've been hitting "duress" on this server again, meaning that at times there's a whole lot of activity going on. Our CTO has been monitoring this and has come to the conclusion that if we can hold out for another few weeks, up to a month, then we'll have moved to our new chat technology which is far more robust than this and speed should be OK then. The problem is actually in the way that the 'search' engine performs on this one. in the future, the new search engine will be much faster and not a drain on the entire system....thanks for holding on for us, this thing is really, really growing and remember, the number of posts is actually a very small part of total activity - there is a world of lurkers wating to make their first comments.