Hi Everyone,
We basically scoured every part of the forum trying to speed it up this morning. We reached the point where it was just ridiculous that we couldn't get lightning fast responses everywhere all the time. We're running tests with different browsers, different login names, to see what takes the most time for new users, old users.
We've found that the post count of how many new threads and new posts, and who the last poster to the forum was, took a comparatively long amount of time depending on how many unread messages you had.
For an account that had almost all read, it took only about 2.5 seconds to display it all.
For an account that had almost all unread, it took about 10 seconds.
At the same time, the searches were taking an incredibly long time to load. This is because many people liked to search all the forums. All of the nearly-300,000 posts had to be checked before it could return data.
So we had to limit it to just one forum at a time. This may require people to do more than 1 search to find what they're looking for, but I doubt it. All that is required is to do a little thinking about which forum is most likely to have your answers.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice a little to gain a lot.
-Ibrahim