SO....

[FONT=Times New Roman]The slowness occurs when there are concurrent attempts to update some key tables. db_cache appears to take the place of a session file in php. As always, we can't control how an application is written but the use of a database for this will always be slower than if one allowed php and the webserver to control the session file itself. Necessarily, if the session table (db_cache in this case) has to be written to, no-one can read from it. With php controlled sessions, everyone has their own session file, so there is no such waiting.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]What would be the best setting?[/FONT]
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// For SQL_CACHE_METHOD, you can select from: none, database, or file

and

define('STORE_SESSIONS', ''); // use 'db' for best support, or '' for file-based storage


also, how do i fix the whois issue?

[FONT=Times New Roman]The use of whos_online also consumes resources. It too can lock up as it is constantly being updated, edited and written to. This application will slow down with time, but even though we, as visitors, are not viewing the current on line statistics, as we move around this table has to be updated and we don't get our page until it is[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]or should I just assume 3 sec a page is going to be the best that I'm going to get?[/FONT]
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[FONT=Times New Roman]Thank you for any help ![/FONT]