I think I know why the forums can sometimes get slow, if you take a look at this page : https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=online You can see that there are robots crawling the forum. This is expected since those are used to index content for search engine. However, at the time that I write this post, there are 86 instances of the Aspiegel PetalBot crawler currently indexing pages in this forum. This one is known as a very aggressive Chinese crawler that can hog a considerable amount of bandwidth of a server, see : https://www.grantforrest.me.uk/index.php/software/16-petalbot-another-pain-in-the-bot If the forums slow down to a crawl again, Larian might consider to blacklist some misbehaving bots.
That was our theory. Unfortunately badly behaved bots are the ones that tend to ignore the robots.txt files, so they can be hard to get rid of, but our admin vometia had requested a number of steps that should help. Unfortunately she's off at the moment so I'm not sure exactly where we are on that.
I've also been (somewhat casually, I admit) tracking forum performance against bot presence and though there's some indication that it could be a contributing factor, the correlation isn't really strong enough to blame it for all our woes. Aspiegel PetalBot is my top suspect, with Yandex a runner up, but there are times we've had 60 instances of it crawling around the site and performance has been fine, and other times when there have been 20-30 and it's been terrible. But I agree bots could be behind at least some slowdowns, so protecting against them as best we can could help.
I'm not sure when vometia will be back, but I'll see if there's a way to get a progress update from someone else.
"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"
