Hi,

thank you for your detailed analysis.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM mlf2_entries WHERE spam = 1
includes/main.inc.php, line 336. Time 581 milliseconds!
includes/main.inc.php, line 339. Time 528 milliseconds!

I think, the spam-column (and the user_id) should be an indexed column. Can you add this index to your database and run the analysis again?

ALTER TABLE `mlf2_entries` ADD INDEX(`spam`);
ALTER TABLE `mlf2_entries` ADD INDEX(`user_id`);

The number of posts and the number of threads

... can be static (i.e. updated by a SQL trigger)

/Micha