OK I'll keep investigating on my own.
Again, the forums run blazing fast after you make that first post. There's no issue at all with general forum speed. The forums are quite fine. They are perfectly content with the system resources.
The only operation which seems to have a serious problem is making an initial post when you first arrive at the forum. So there has got to be something unique about that step of activity. I'll see if I can step through it and figure out what. I.e. how does it get assigned to a session ID? Maybe it's something as simple as the session ID tracking table is full of rows and isn't indexed.
