Support Forum

Well if the page I saw before is anything to go by then it is still making a very heavy demand on many tables - i.e., WP posts and postmeta. And if most or many of those articles have a link to a forum then yes - to the sflinks table as well.

I think if you want to improve this any further then you need to start taking a look at what the WP theme is doing for each of those article extracts. Try turning off the comment count for example - see what effect that has. This really does seem to me to come down largely to a theme issue although if after diagnosis of the theme there is anything we can do to better optimise our part of it then we are more than willing to do so. But I am not sure we can improve on what we have added.

By the way - that fix does have some knock on effects the most important of which is that it fails to make new post/forum links. There is additional code on lace to deal with this and an updated version is likely to be released today.

Apologies for the delay - had a bit of an emergency yesterday.
It is possible whether they are needed or not may come down to how you have the comment options set up. I would need to set up a series of tests to try out different scenarios before I could make an informed analysis.

Why not try it and see how things pan out. Not just in the front page however, but also at all other points where post data is displayed and comment data is required. You may get there before I do I am afraid.