One of the best things I ever did was install the pagespeed addon for Firefox. It works with Firebug, and it gives you a detailed ranking on your page's speed and how to optimize your site to make it load faster.
Optimizing images is a good way to cut down on load times. Also using a php accelerator such as eAccelerator, and using a caching system such as Memcached will help with site performance. There a lots of tutorials on vbulletin.com and vbulletin.org on how to set that up.
If you really get into optimization, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to story your sites static content will give you a nice performance boost as well. Services such as Amazon's S3 are perfect for just that.
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