Hi Charles, nice to hear from you and thanks for the help.

I did this several times and got several sub-second page generation times. Then I got this:

Generated in 10.337 seconds in which 8.99 seconds were spent on a total of 24 queries. Zlib compression enabled.

Longest queries:

Query: SELECT t1.Bo_Title , t1.Bo_Description , t1.Bo_Keyword , t1.Bo_Total , t1.Bo_Last , t1.Bo_Number , t1.Bo_Moderated , t1.Bo_Read_Perm , t1.Bo_Write_Perm , t1.Bo_Threads , t1.Bo_Sorter , t1.Bo_Posterid , t1.Bo_LastMain , t1.Bo_LastNumber , t2.U_Username , t3.B_Subject , t3.B_Icon , t3.B_Reged , t3.B_AnonName , t1.Bo_Image FROM w3t_Boards AS t1 LEFT JOIN w3t_Users AS t2 ON t1.Bo_Posterid = t2.U_Number LEFT JOIN w3t_Posts AS t3 ON t1.Bo_LastNumber = t3.B_Number WHERE t1.Bo_Cat = 2 AND (t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-3-%' OR t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-1-%' OR t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-2-%') ORDER BY t1.Bo_Sorter
table type possible_keys key key_len ref rows Extra
t1 ref Cat_ndx Cat_ndx 4 const 2 where used; Using filesort
t2 eq_ref PRIMARY,indx3 PRIMARY 4 t1.Bo_Posterid 1
t3 eq_ref PRIMARY,w3t_Postsindex2 PRIMARY 4 t1.Bo_LastNumber 1
Query took a total of 0.214 seconds.

Query: SELECT t1.Bo_Title , t1.Bo_Description , t1.Bo_Keyword , t1.Bo_Total , t1.Bo_Last , t1.Bo_Number , t1.Bo_Moderated , t1.Bo_Read_Perm , t1.Bo_Write_Perm , t1.Bo_Threads , t1.Bo_Sorter , t1.Bo_Posterid , t1.Bo_LastMain , t1.Bo_LastNumber , t2.U_Username , t3.B_Subject , t3.B_Icon , t3.B_Reged , t3.B_AnonName , t1.Bo_Image FROM w3t_Boards AS t1 LEFT JOIN w3t_Users AS t2 ON t1.Bo_Posterid = t2.U_Number LEFT JOIN w3t_Posts AS t3 ON t1.Bo_LastNumber = t3.B_Number WHERE t1.Bo_Cat = 75 AND (t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-3-%' OR t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-1-%' OR t1.Bo_Read_Perm LIKE '%-2-%') ORDER BY t1.Bo_Sorter
table type possible_keys key key_len ref rows Extra
t1 ref Cat_ndx Cat_ndx 4 const 1 where used; Using filesort
t2 eq_ref PRIMARY,indx3 PRIMARY 4 t1.Bo_Posterid 1
t3 eq_ref PRIMARY,w3t_Postsindex2 PRIMARY 4 t1.Bo_LastNumber 1
Query took a total of 0.166 seconds.

Those two are identical? multiple instances of the same query?

The first one above is always the slowest, whenever we have the slowdown (which is happening a lot this afternoon).