[dmak]

Wow really? This seems really surprising to me.

[twoodfin]

Speculating, but presumably this table only needed consultation during creation of a new user session. That’s probably a pretty heavyweight operation to begin with, so adding a scan of a few KB (user IDs being modestly sized integers) for every thousand currently paying users is NBD.

[raldi]

Nope; it was used every time we needed to look up whether someone was a subscriber, which was cached for some things but not all of them.