How much has a mysql database handle. Lets say you're running a database with 500,000 members. Will it be really slow? does it just depend on the server you have?
Depends on what indexes you have on your database tables. If it has good indexes it can easily handle millions of records in each table
Databases can handle large amount of information, is your hosting or server settings in combination with your software can make it slow or returning error connections
I ran into an issue running the 500 meg 150k article dbase for articlesnatch - but i moved it to a clustered hosting environment... we are going to see how it goes...
Databases become slow mainly due to design. With the right amount of normalisation and indexing then you shouldnt have any problems. I have seen and have run MySQL databases myself with millions of records. Its all about design.