Distributed Tables vs. fewer Monster Tables

I am putting the finishing touches on a forum program which has a direct lineage (look and feel at least) to Matt Wright's WWWBoard perl script. Remember that? Today I have one table per forum. The forums on my live test site are huge. http://www.astronomy.net/forums/ I have long dreamed of combining all the messages into one big honking table in MySQL and parse accordingly. I already know how to do this, but wonder the following: - Will MySQL lookup performance suffer... much? - Is this just not a good idea? - Will this make MySQL just flat out quit? I have heard the hype behind MySQL being able to handle incredible amounts of data with relative ease. I hear that MySQL does a good job when you are doing mostly reads as is the case here. So far, I have had absolutly no issues with MySQL and just love it. Thus, I am automatically biased. So what say you non-biased folks about data management for a multi-topic forum where each forum has identical structure, but differ only in topic? Combine and simplify? or Divide and conquer? John ************************************** John Huggins Virginia Net Corporation 7101 Oriole Avenue Springfield, VA 22150 703-912-6214 703-912-4831 fax jhuggins@va.net http://www.va.net/ **************************************