and of course, just as I post this, the response time improves greatly

registered so I could throw out this link for some SMF specific performance enhancements, then forgot that I couldn't post in Meta cause the new newbs rule, so I'm posting it here...

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Performance_enhancements

some of these may help, but I imagine the bottleneck is probably closer to bare metal than the forum software