Ie has its own timeout, just load it in firefox and let it go; FFox has a much MUCH longer timeout than IE.

As for the size, it stores both an "original" and a "formatted" version of every posting; so it will be huge. No way to fix it. It will not go down.

holy crap. wull thats ... pretty disappointing to hear, to say the least.

i finally finished the install of 7.1.1, but this database issue seems like it will cause me all sorts of new problems. i was workin on a huge database before with a 130mb gz backup file. now, its 278mb!

its pretty unbelievable. why were things set up in this new fashion? doesn't it cause issues all over the place?

does the fact that i'm using an all new table prefix (ubbt instead of w3t) mean anything? i mean, is it a scenario where all the w3t portions of my database can be nixed to free up space, or did everything just get converted and ballooned?

helps optimize things; rick talked about it at central.

and the table prefix opton doens't matter; the ubb7 default is differant than 6, and i'm using threads_ and ubb_ on mine

ahh, so its not like my old boards are taking up space in w3t, and my new ones are doubling it with all the same threads at ubbt?

just double checking.

i haven't deleted my old boards yet (just copying over the settings, first. might take me another day or so.)

if thats just the way it is, then i still might be in a crapload of trouble. my cpanel lists my MySQL disk space at 1824.37 megabytes. which... is big.

i dont remember off the top of my head what it was prior to 7.1.1, as i only ever really looked at the cron backup file sizes, but i know it was never even close to that.

these message boards are the only thing using my database. its a huge message board, true, but... should it really be taking up that much space?

7.x will be double the size of 6.x; as posts are stored twice; all posts, no way around it whatsoever.

BTW, your board isn't huge, talk to Ian, his are huge lol

man, that is nutty.

now, after all the trouble getting rid of the old boards to please my server hosts, i'm worried they're gonna come after me for having too large of a database! (never got so close to 2GB before!)

on a side note, i gotta admit i'm pretty impressed that the GZ can compress the database backup that much! 1.8 gb to less than 300 mb is amazing!

other than literally deleting threads/members, is there anything else you can think of that i can do to sorta ease the burden of the beast a bit?

Other than begging Rick for some sort of flatfile archiving system (like i've been trying for a while)