Does the number of members affect how a forum runs?

[Fatoran]

I go to a forum with a relatively high member account (37393 at last check).
Most of these accounts are inactive, but this member often gets extended periods of times where there is an error message about the board not working properly.
Could this have anything at all to do with the large amount of inactive accounts, or just from the constant level of high activity on the forum?

If the inactive accounts were deleted, would the board run better, and with less chance of problems?

[Louis M.]

I gather it would technicly have an effect because of database size. The bigger effect would come from activity on the actual forum it self.

[ErwinB]

If I'm not wrong (I may be - I don't remember exactly the query), the query uses 'WHERE' clause. So I don't think that's an issue with the index. But if you have a big amount of posts, it may be a problem, since MySQL will have to parse a huge Fulltext index. It depends on how big is your board. I don't think that the number of member may be an issue.

Can you give us the error message you get when your board isn't working properly?

[atomicknight]

But if you have a big amount of posts, it may be a problem, since MySQL will have to parse a huge Fulltext index.

Only when you're searching though. Even so, it's still a huge improvement over no index - parsing indexes isn't a terribly long process.

But really, the number of members shouldn't matter. What's probably happening is that the supplementary queries aren't properly indexed and so that's slowing things down. It just happens to correlate with more members because more of those supplementary queries are executed due to the additional simultaneous visits.

[bfarber]

If the owner is having resource problems they should submit a ticket.

As to the general inquiry, the raw number of members will have little impact on how the site runs, assuming the database indexes are correctly in place. What affects the speed of the site more is the number of members concurrently using the site.