Messages Read Count feature

The C3VR Forum speed has been noticably slower lately, and I have located the issue. It is because of the feature that tells you if there unread messages or not.

It is currently set up to be very personalized. It actually marks messages read, as you read them so that you'll know. However, as membership grows and the number of messages grow the table that holds that information continues to get bigger. Right now that table is at almost 1,000,000 records. It takes the site about 3 seconds to get the information for you out of that 1,000,000 records.

If I remove this feature, the C3VR Forum pages will load in about 1 second instead of 3-5 seconds. But, of course, you will lose the ability to see what message you have read or not.

I could also look into changing the feature to just check and see if there are new messages since your last visit. That query would probably take a lot less time.

So I want to pose the question to you all to find out what I should do about it.