My general goal here is to host reliable, highly popular forums - and LEFT JOIN queries are used throughout forum packages such as Invision Power Board, vBulletin, phpBB etc..

I've been struggling to deliver adequate performance with hosting said forums with a single database server, which continuously gets hardware upgrades to keep ahead.

Presently using a Dual Xeon 2.6Ghz w/ 4GB RAM and SCSI disks.. which is doing OK for the moment but my major bottleneck is disk access - ie, large select statements and update statements that cause table locking.

I've even tried BDB and InnoDB which have produced worse results than MyISAM!

So, i am indeed looking for a scalable high reliability solution but MySQL Cluster version 4.1.10, in its current form, seems to need applications to be specifically developed to use specific select/update/insert queries to take advantage of its performance advantages.

Yet we have spoken about this being dealt with in the v5 tree, so I hope to see a new release where this is resolved.

Thank you all for your time and assistance.