Quote:
I would imagine, although not the least real knowledge, that the New Posts button would be a search that could be optimised on the server frequently and served up to one and all, rather than a search that is specific - keyword, username, sort by posts rather than thread, for example - that is done once.
This is what I was getting at when I asked Inc in an earlier post what was causing the I/O - a common search using only things like time & date fields could easily be indexed so as to cause less of a hit. Indexing is always a trade off of how often it's results are used compared to the server hit of creating and updating the index.