How fast is your forum?
 

The addition of Site Performance in Google Webmaster Tools has given me a rude awakening to my site's dismal load times. Apparently, my average loadtime across the site is 4.0 seconds, and the forum homepage loads in 6.3 seconds. It's running on a dedicated server with plenty of overhead at all times, so it's not a hardware issue. I've been reading up on optimizing vbulletin and I'm starting to implement the suggestions, but I'm curious about how our site compares to other vbulletin forums.

If you care to answer, how fast is your forum?

Dedi with 6.3 seconds?
Im on a shared with my homepage loading at 0.93 seconds.

I think we're talking about different things. I'm measuring the time it takes for a page to fully load, not just response time from the server. Is gamingcube.org the site you're measuring at 0.93 seconds? The three tests I did for gamingcube.org on Pingdom showed page load times between 7.9-10.4 seconds.

pages in your site take 1.5 seconds to load (updated on Dec 4, 2009). This is faster than 77% of sites

No another site i manage with a friend, i tweaked it. :)
I dont bother with Gaming Cube.

Oh, man. Part of me is depressed that my site is performing so slowly in comparison to your sites. Another part of me is very hopeful that there are steps I can take to bridge the gap. Is there any information I can provide to the two of you that would help identify the cause of the slowness?

If you use vBSEO, it loads up your site sometimes :)

Yep, I'm using vBSEO, but I don't see how it would slow down the forum homepage.

vbseo can actually speed up the load time since it strips out some of the html ;)
there are several factors in page load time.. it's really rather hard to compare one site to another this way, you will want to know what mods the site has, what type of style it has and then you have the whole server side of it..

Since my last post, we've installed memcache and gzip, which appear to have cut page load times in half. I'm sure there are still improvements to be made, but I'm thinking we'll probably hold off on doing anything drastic until after upgrading to 4.0