Well, the last time it took only 3 seconds or so to get the login page up; but it took 73.48 seconds to go from the "You Logged in Successful" page to open the forum's main (entrance) page.
When I used the "Post New Reply" tab I lost the forum page. Internet Explorer would not show the page. When I went back to my Favorites link and returned to the forum's entrance page, I was no longer logged in, so I had to re-logged in.
Maybe you've helped the time problem, it only took 8.8 seconds my last login on my forum.
I will be monitoring the forums for the next 24 hours to see if the config changes have helped. Let me know if you see anything strange, if there are any improvements or degradation in performance.
It was slow this morning during backups which resulted in some timeout errors. The backups took 39 minutes and are performed every second day. This to me is acceptable i.e. less than an hour of downtime every second day to safeguard the forums in the event of a disaster.
I am going to concentrate on the paid forums in the near future (i.e. I'm going to enforce billing more strictly) and put the proceeds into better hardware.