I haven't super into it yet, but I've been getting occasional long page load times, on the order of 5-10 seconds. For forums I consider this acceptable, but, if anyone else is experiencing it or had a suggestion, yea.
In both FF and Vivaldi, its just the initial index.php?blah that takes long, fonts and js and stuff all take milliseconds.
Oh that's odd. all the pages load near instantly for me, I wonder if anyone else has that problem but hasn't said anything...
Okay, update, I have been getting this every now and then too. I have noooo idea what's causing it. Will have to look into it a little deeper.
I did in the process of this find out that dark reader extension (which I only had installed for Ao3 and nothing else) was slightly contributing to slower initial render on all sites, on firefox. but was not the issue
This does look to be on the server side, specifically an issue with SMF. A thread (https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=544717.0) I found, from 8 years ago, has a comment suggesting disabling an option for looking up hostnames. Not really sure if that'll fix it, but I gave it a try nonetheless. Let's see.
Seems better!
Yeah I really think that was it. It's recommended not to turn off that option due to moderation stuff, particularly ensuring IP banning is more effective, but there's only people I trust here so it's a non-issue.