After meditating in the hot tub tonight, I got motivated and fixed two old forum bugs. The first only mods ever saw, but it would take a long time to "delete" a post (in quotes because really the status is changed). Really long SQL timeouts being logged. Turns out it was firing off the search reindexing process, which normally it does in the background. Duh.
The other problem was the view counts dropping to zero now and then for no apparent reason. That was a caching issue, which I solved by simply not caching topic records. It's an optimization that didn't need optimizing. Silly trap to fall into, and one I was reminded of the other day by something one of my devs was doing, and again tonight chatting with a former coworker.
When I dive into the old crusty parts, I'm surprised at how many things I did sub-optimally, yet it's still very maintainable. I need to remember not to try and rewrite it all again just because I know better now. There's very little return on investment to do that.