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All the same, bear in mind that webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome) ARE consistently faster than FF and much lighter as well. Opera is faster as well. But odd.

I've just spent 5 or so minutes trawling your forum.

Mac/Firefox 9/No browser cache on. Max 2mb ADSL broadband connection (we're more rural here!)

I only found one page that took longer than 2 seconds to load up. In fact, I was rather envious and proud at how fast it was all loading. The one blip was on a topic view that had 29 posts. I would seriously consider dropping that and paging. It does go without saying that the more posts you display per page then the longer it is going to take to compile the display... that's what paging is really for across all web apps! It''s a trade-off... show more data slowly or less data quickly but your users need to load more pages. The end result may take the same time but loading quicker is a better user experience.

The only other relatively slow page was just waiting for an ad to get loaded and you are pulling in data from multiple sources so you have to expect that to happen. But on the whole I would be over the moon with the kind of performance I was just seeing so I really do not understand your issues. And as I say - that was with my browser cache turned off!

There are quite a few WP plugins that will perform timings, query breakdowns etc. We do not litter production code with debug breakpoints but have been using them extensively through the development process.

We also have a mySQL long query log active of, I believe, anything over a second. Ironically, it mainly just reports a couple of WP core queries if it ever reports anything at all - especially the early grab of the WP Options table which is just about the most inefficient mess you could encounter. Keeping that table clean of garbage is a good idea.

One thing I will recommend that we know can be a performance killer... if are using Gravatars then download and activate the SP gravatar cache plugin.

And finally - yes we are caching more and more internally and it is the one area where I continually look for improvements and opportunities to do more.

Update Edit:  By the way I should have added that the 'slow' page with the 29 posts took just under 5 seconds so it was not actually a go and make a cup of coffee moment!