Its pretty much imposible in my opinion to guess at what might be causing any slowdowns.

For me on a very poor quality dial up service the site seems very good . I have never had a problem with the forums and even gallery browsing is good.

I look at the freestuff section regularly and the store maybe once a week . It all seems to be working fairly well.

Maybe a dedicated thread to response time problems might help if there is nothing obvious in the server logs.