[Vince]

I wouldn't put my finger on it, initially. However, as your playerbase grows so will your database. Searching through larger tables takes more time. Meanwhile, the server also needs to keep track of players and events. It can't do that while executing a non-threaded query. Regular selects are fairly doable, but once you start to join, group and order the results the execution time significantly increases. Consider this real life example:

PHP код:

SELECT country_code, count(*) AS amount 
FROM core_ip_table 
GROUP BY country_code 
ORDER BY amount DESC 


A table with 80k rows. Grouping and ordering takes approximately 60 milliseconds.

Sticking to an older version because you know it isn't really an excuse either. That would be like sticking with DOS while you could use Windows 8. Eventually you'll have to upgrade. Better to do it sooner than later.