Forum speed and performance

My forum seems to be getting slower by .1 second every two to three months. It averages about 2.3 seconds on the index now. I was wondering what can be done to increase the speed other than deleting posts or moving out of MS Access.

Would it help if I reduce the number of forums on the index or reduce the number of "lone" moderators?

255 MB database, 110k posts
MS Access
31 forum sections
About 45 mod assignments on the forum


Edited by -boRg- - 19 October 2005 at 12:42pm

I realize access isn't the ideal database, but what I also see is that my forum sub-indexes, even the biggest (15k posts), still generates the page in 0.4 seconds compared to 2.3 seconds on the main page. 0.4 seconds is very comparable to the sections on this forum, which I assume runs on SQL. So doesn't this imply that there're ways I can speed up the index by removing content and/or forum section?. For example, It looks like if I replace the forum index with a completely static page, it would essentially fix all the speed problems. (obviously a static page isn't so great, but some of the features like post count and "code generated" moderator checking I can definately cut out and still suffice)