Database performance question

The number of table really doesn't affect the database as much as the number of rows in the tables. Having 10,000 tables with 10 rows would perform faster than 1 table with 100,000 rows.

I have database with about 60 tables with 4 or 5 tables with over 50,000 records and this database performs much faster than the databas on the same server with 10 tables and six tables with over 150,000

Thanks. That's what I was thinking, but I wasn't too sure.

The database I'm thinking of already has close to 100, but I want to add the forum (7.01) into the database (18 more tables) along with some new functionality for it.

Next question: Now if one area, e.g. the forum here, has a great number of rows in some tables, e.g. tblTopic, tblThread, tblAuthor, etc., will that adversely affect the performance of the rest of the DB? There will only be two areas in the rest of the DB that link to the forums - for the Authors portion of WWF.

I'm integrating portions of the forums with a registration process. I'd like to automatically create forum users when they register. etc. etc.

Thanks