Support Forum

Well of course a forum plugin sitting within a framework like WordPress is always going to be a little slower as there is more overhead to load and deal with - i.e., WordPress itself, it's theme and any other plugins you are running. A stand alone forum application does not have any of this.

Having said that I think our forum here is probably as average as you can get and we are quite comfortable with the performance. Number of users and number for posts has no real bearing on performance - that is a red herring. The number of forums may bit even that is minimal.

The biggest threat to performance is the same for any WordPress based site - which is quality of hosting,

There are also a few other things which can be taken into consideration. The number of plugins for example; if you have the right ones in use for your needs; what WP plugins you may have active. Etc. When concerned it is important to run tests and measurements so you can find where bottlenecks are so you can take action to help solve them. But as I said above - a lot can come down to the hosting,

As to the message - which is not an error by the way - then it seems to be saying that your sever is timing out while trying to contact our server. So maybe your server really is clogged up. What does your hosting support say?

It contacts our server to see if any updates are available. Once it makes contact it downloads an XML document with upgrade data and caches it in the database until it might be outdated. it should, i believe only do this on the WP Updates page and the WP Plugins page but I would have to check my facts n that one. It might do it when the forum admin is first accessed...

If you run a dedicated server then you must also be in control of it so perhaps you could take a look at your log files to see what they have to say about the attempt(s) to connect to our server. Might be some useful pointer in there.