Our site uses forums that are HEAVILY trafficked.  The amount of posts and replies have gotten pretty huge, and now performance is suffering under all that load.

I know that there's a way to archive older posts, but then these archived posts will no longer be available to the end user.  That kind of defeats the purpose as we don't want to constantly answer the same questions over and over again (because, obviously, users never search the FAQs - they'd rather just ask the question for the 100000th time.)

What solutions have you guys used to deal with this kind of issue? 

--- (Edited on 9/28/2011 9:19 am [GMT-0500] by soverybored) ---