Cheers Dries, Replying on the development list.
did you had the chance to look into that forum.module SQL cleanup?
Yes, indeed. The problem is that the logic buried in the forum code for handling shadow copies turns up too often, and I cannot get the picture. As far as I see, the whole code is too much reliant on having a $node->tid, which needs a query to become a property of the node object (thanks to forum_load()), and it is probbaly only possible to omit this query with deep overthinking of how forums work. The hook_link() and hook_view() implementations both need this tid. True, there is no need to have this tid just to display a list of forum topics, or some other metadata, but the whole node_load() concept is built upon the fact that you will need the data loaded in. So maybe those list displays need to use some light load mechanism. Oterwise there is no performance penalty of supporting shadow copies, since we would only replace {forum} with {term_node} in the often used queries, and would only remove some administrative (insert, update, delete) queries with dropping the shadow copy feature. Gabor