Large read-only archives are rarely touched. They would be a performance hit, but not nearly as much as a live, active forum.

You have nearly a half million messages... you could consider UBB.threads, but only if the advise I gave above fails to make performance acceptable. Otherwise, there's no need to move yet. Now, if your traffic were to double, then I'd advise moving.

However, with such a large message base, you would almost certainly need beefier hardware so MySQL can perform well.

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