Which is why I'd prefer if the Steam Profiles show up in Forum Profiles than PostBits.

That's the odd thing. The steam profiles plugin was disabled, only the steam connect was set enabled which was causing the longer loading towards threads and new threads.

loads fine on my site.. no slowdowns..

I just re-tried. Using this plugin (enabled) causes major slow-downs in loading threads. Once disabled, loading threads goes very fast.

I never seen anything on my pages saying waiting for Steam... Does this happen when Steam friends is down or all the time? Am curious because I never paid attention when Steam friends being down causing issues with page load nor have I ever seen or noticed any page load lag from this directly...

It shouldn't affect the thread loading time at all, I have the steam profile plugin completely disabled and even removed. Only the steam login is enabled.. How does that affect the forum loading times in threads?

Another feature idea - how variable to optionally force information to be retrieved from Steam rather than from cache when using the function? This would be particularly useful in cron jobs to avoid a double-delay in updates being processed.

Not quite sure what you mean - can you explain a little more detailed?

Sorry I probably used the wrong terminology.

Perhaps there should be a way to force fetch_steam_info to get information from Steam rather than from the cache.

Does that make sense?

There is already a way to force steam connect NOT using the cache, just set the cache lifetime to 0 and/or leave the path to the cache dir empty if you want to diable the file cache.

Good news nontheless: I found a bug with the additional fields which caused to redownload the profile data every request over and over again which is now fixed.
Also, the internal cache works better now which increases page load time A LOT.

Releasing next version later today or tomorrow.