it actually had more to do with the poor indexing system (don't you just love it when a thread takes several minutes to load because it's scanning through thousands of table indexes, possibly while doing a filesystem sort, pulling data to display?), but thanks for playing
faster disk + newer mysql + more cpu power should be able to cope with > 1000+ post threads, but it will choke still if you people make giant pointless post threads with awesome thought-provoking replies like "ibtn" and such
edit: well, at any rate Nick pays me for my IT services now so it doesn't really matter to me if the database gets broken or not... server problems just means $$$ headed my way!

