must be getting hammered tonight. Transit time from here isn't too bad:

PING Statistics for www.ar15.com
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 130/171/251

so I figure the CPU must be fairly saturated. I ran my "PageGet" utility to retrieve one of the topic pages (page only, no graphics):

http://www.ar15.com/forums/topic.html?id=5509

and got the following response times for 5 loops:

1 - 19107
2 - 15763
3 - 17475
4 - 19178
5 - 23153
Total bytes: 149250
Bytes/sec: 1574.6
Total time (sec.): 94.786
Average response time (msec.): 18935.2

Though informative, continuously updating the stats on each page seems fairly ambitious resource-wise in a high traffic situation.

I gather you're using an embedded scripting language to do the work? If that's the case, maybe you could run the same script after each post to a topic but direct the output into a straight HTML file which is what gets viewed. The "number of times read" stats are interesting but could be jettisoned if they're too expensive. Since "reads" to the database overwhelmingly outnumber "writes" this might make things zippier.

Nice job on the site. I know it's a helluva lotta work. Layout and formatting are now much easier to read compared to "Version 1".