mysql performance + bugzilla

[Jonathan Schatz]

I've gotten a few complaints here that our bugzilla is "too slow". most
of the complaints come from people who weren't around to witness the
horror of our old gnats installation, or the horror of bugzilla running
in a vm on my desktop. one of the complaints is that the bugs table will
continuously grow (and therefore become inefficient). i checked on b.m.o
and saw that there are > 200k bugs filed there (we're still under 40k
here). so my questions are:

1) does mysql performance degrade linearly with the size of a table?
2) is there any fancy reindexing i could do to speed up queries?
3) what hardware + software (specifically, db + httpd) is b.m.o running?

thanks,

-jon