We think we found some "throw away" on our server and it seems to be sustaining the line of compression much better.
The forum software was upgraded yesterday to the latest release along with some of our feature plug-ins. We turned off some suspected "high overhead" features and are keeping an eye on things.
We are going to run a few tests over the next couple of weeks to see if we can fine tune a little bit. If performance starts to degrade again, we will have some certainty that it's not related to our server configuration, but the provider network. Hopefully this will give Bambam an opportunity to complete his finish swivel. It's looking very, very good.