The strange thing is that the roundtrip times and DNS query times are always pretty normal. From where I live RTTs are around 150 ms, which is OK. Not blindingly fast, but not slow either. Which means the problem is not in the network, and it's not in the client machine.

The site performance greatly varies, though. Sometimes it's reasonably fast, sometimes it's agonizingly slow. I haven't been able to pinpoint a pattern. It's not related to the number of users online - sometimes the site is fast with over 2000 users, sometimes it's slow with less than 1200 users.

The only thing I can think of is the full text indexing engine. Maybe it causes the site to slow down when it's updating the catalogs.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

My gallery   My freestuff