my.cnf settings in order to prevent long load time for huge threads?

[Dan Druff]

I have a forum which is relatively small, with low-medium traffic. However, it seems that in the past 3 years, the main activity takes place in a few very long threads.

These threads have about 15,000-40,000 posts each.

I noticed that they were loading quite slowly, sometimes taking as long as 60 seconds to come up. I did notice that, after being loaded recently, the thread then loads fairly quickly for the next user, provided only a short time has passed since it was last loaded. (Perhaps because it was already in memory?)

Anyway, I assumed this was because I only had 4 GB RAM.

I just upgraded to a faster machine with 64 GB RAM.

It has improved a little, but the long load times still persist for those large threads. Perhaps I don't have the my.cnf settings right for a machine with 64GB?

Can someone give me some guidance here? I'm on PHP 5.6, in case you're wondering.

[Mark.B]

Your best bet with threads of that size is to split them. That's long been the case and you can see it done on many large vB3 and vB4 forums.

[Dan Druff]

Yes, I realize that, but I'm afraid it will kill the activity of those threads. My users kinda love the fact that the threads are so huge.

I would think on a modern VPS with 64GB RAM, it should be able to handle it.

Can someone suggest some setting tweaks to try?