five seconds?  not too bad – especially for shared hosting…

certainly adding a forum to a site framework such as WP is going to add some execution time over the base framework…

how many forums do you have?  more forums on a group view, can take more time than less – more queries…  same on forum view and topic view if showing a lot of forums or topics on single page…

if you http requests are slow, the forum will take more time because of all the css and js files that need to get loaded based on the number of sp plugins you have…  I am currently testing a change that will be in the next version where we combine many of our css file and js files into a single css/js file to cut down on the number of http requests…

5 seconds would perhaps be ok if it were for all pages, but the real concern is the longer topic views taking (in this example) nearly 10 second for the page to start rendering.

Group views are all generally fine. I’ve only got four forums, one hidden, and as you can see from the results, it’s only the waiting time for the initial page that is causing this (unless I’m reading something wrong)… the subsequent loading of images, css and js is really not that bad (partly because of the steps taken above).

Anything I can tweak on the server, or anything specific I should be asking my host to look at, before we discuss moving to a VPS?

This is really outside of my level of expertise (Steve is more knowledgeable about all of this than I am) but in my own experience those long waits to grab the connection to your site so that the page can start to be compiled are fairly typical of shared hosting contention… and with shared hosting there is not usually much they can tweak.

Out of my level of expertise too, hence asking! Thanks for the comments… thing is, other sites on my own hosting don’t have anywhere near these delays, even other forums (phpbb on non-Wordpress sites). Really waiting for the host to get back to me but if anyone else has any experiences from shared hosting, i’d love to hear.