Josh,
Thank you for your reply.

Yes, my stats show max on line as 148... that's in a 3 minute window. I have the settings at the minimum. In addition, that doesn't reflect actual connections as we know that many browse with multiple windows open and the users on line feature only recognizes unique IP's. A look at the query stats would be more telling. The average is 5,443,200 queries a day or 226,800 an hour or 3,780 a minute or 63 a second.
Yes, less than 6000 users as on a monthly basis, I clear out the users with less than 5 posts who haven't logged in for over 18 months. This helps to keep the database a little trimmer. Those numbers really don't reflect usage. However, these numbers do:
Users that have logged in the past 24 hours... 875
Users that have logged in the past 7 days... 1542
Users that have logged in the past month... 2203
Users that have never logged in... 686
The post numbers really don't reflect traffic on my board either as the # of posts doesn't represent the # of queries or connections... but here they are anyway:
Posted in the last 24 hours... 998
Posted in the last week... 6571
Posted in the last month... 29868
Total # of topics... 56890
Total # of replies... 585256
And my average
daily bandwidth transfer is @ 5 GB.
Yes, I've done modifications however very few and they have all been from mods listed here on ThreadsDev. Anything that seemed to be more of a draw on the database was quickly removed. Almost all of the permanent images on the site are hosted on a different server with the exception of graemlins and you have more here than I do... I've tried to keep those down too. I have full confidence in my server as they have worked on this for more hours than I can even begin to imagine. They have made all of the adjustments that they can at this point without writing specific scripts for monitoring and troubleshooting. I've had this problem for over a year now with two different versions of UBBT... which means
they have been working on it for over a year now too.
Regardless of the size of my forum, I agree that I definately shouldn't have these kinds of problems. Looking through the threads here and reading of other's experiences with this issue, it seems that it is not one that is specific to any certain size forum or certain server settings or config settings. It just is.