How can I cut down on the loading times for my forum? I used "website optimization" look at how long it takes to load and all of the stats and heaps of forum-specific scripts are consuming the speed.
No I don't want to use archive mode.
Yes I can strip some of the plugins and other features if needed to speed up the forum.
Well you could optimize your database tables from within the admincp. Not sure converting the tables to utf-8 might help as well....
Then as you say you could strip some of the plugins and other features that are consuming speed.
Some Webmasters find that if you delete all users with less then one post count (Not sure if you can run any command like the on MyBB) it increases your speed by a noticable amount.
How many queries are being run per page?? What's the page load time and global parsing time from the debug stats at the bottom of the page??
turn off template start-end in server optimize section, enable gzip compression and uninstall and delete plugin files (if they are in the plugin folder they get parsed even if disabled from what I can tell)