which members list?  front end?  anything in the error log?  sounds perhaps like running out of memory?

I can’t see how I could possibly be running out of memory… everything is running on a fairly badass dedicated server.  My members list is getting rather long but it’s just names ans basic info, shouldn’t take that much memory.   As it turns out, it does load actually… just takes about 30-45 seconds. 

Oh, and this is the members list on the top of the forum itself, so not in the backend. 

understand the front end…

how many users?  the members handles hundreds of thousands so shouldnt really matter…f

and its not a complex query… this is 5.3?