I've been having the same problem with my forum. I thought it was my computer but I tried a different one and then posted the load time question for my members.
I archived all post that were older than 5 months and changed our background colors to something plain to see if that helps. I'll also wait and see if your updates make any difference too.
I'll notice a 4.3 -20.2 second load time at times. So will see ....
The database table indexes were being rebuilt over the weekend. That job took over two days to complete and was responsible for the slow page loading times. It has finished now but I will need to check to make sure that it completed correctly. I may need to run similar jobs in the future. I'll post any updates in this thread.
Quite unreliable and time consuming, as shown by this snapshot I took a few minutes ago (about 12:30 P.M.). I was not able to even post a reply in answer to your question (for more than 10 minutes) due to Microsoft timeouts when trying to get to your last post. Sorry
I just had active topics here take 42.9 seconds to load, then when I clicked on the last post link which was your post above I got this... Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0 error '80040e31'
Query timeout expired
/topic.asp, line 414
Clicked the back arrow and clicked on the last post link again and got the page to generate in 15.11 seconds.
I've made some changes to day to stop the thousands of bots trying to spam the forum. If you get a message saying you're banned post the text of it here. Also, if you notice anything strange post it in this thread.