Help diagnosing slowness - hacks the problem?
 

I've been racking my brain over this for a while and my limited knowledge is clearly not enough so I'm hoping someone will have some advice for me.

I'm on a shared server, and I run multiple vb board sites on it, all 3.03 at the moment. One of them has started to run very slowly, often coming up with page not found errors, when the other boards run just fine. I usually don't have more than 20 users on at one time, some of those guests/spiders (though I do have a robots.txt that is supposed to be blocking them but whatever). Just now I have 12 users on, and the server load was over 22. I've repaired and optimized the tables, have gzip running, don't allow guests to view attachments. I've looked through the logs and not seen anyone hotlinking much.

I don't know much about this, but I'm thinking that if they're all on the same server, it's not the server load that's the problem? If that's the case, is it likely to be a hack I've installed, as this particular board is more heavily hacked with items like the store and pets, vbchat? Would the best way for me to diagnose this be to start with clean files and add back the hacks one by one?

The site in question is http://www.buffy-boards.com

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! :)

Lots of images on that page
Size of whole page: 338.56 kB

The board is currently loading fine for me, but if you're really into optimizing, you should start by removing that array of images on your index. If people want to talk about season X in buffy they can find the right forum without those images. However, for 56k users it must be pain to wait until all the images load to find the forum they need.

Thanks :) We've had those for a long time, so though they do slow loading it's not been a problem in the past. This is something weird and new lol.

Also, I have been running unhacked templates myself to see if that made a loading difference, but it hasn't. :)