When you have something that you care about and it doesn't perform to your standards, it can be quite depressing for lack of a better word. I'm considering several options.

I can prune the database down to two years worth of posts in the Let's Talk Green Bay Packers section.

Pruning
Who would miss that data?
Does anyone actually care to look for that data?
Are there any type of threads that years from now you would want to review?

Prediction threads and GameDay threads are the only topics that I can think that anyone would actually want to review. In that case, we can create a sub forum (Shawn's idea) and place such posts there.

There is no guarantee that pruning the database would even improve the page load times.



New Host
Locate a new host, but then again, we'd have to prune the database to lower than 200MB (Currently we sit at 491MB).



I'm confident the software is not the issue as I've seen other sites have load times generated in 0.133 seconds where as we're seeing pages being generated in 0.438 seconds and sometimes taking 1 second or several seconds to display.


I'm open to all any ideas for improvement, or site diagnostics approaches to improve the site speed.

I think it would be reasonable to prune old threads.
Even the predictions.
If they are 3 years old who really cares that back them Pack93 was genius or not?

Not sure if you've already done something to speed things up, but the pages are loading noticeably quicker for me today.

Opened my browser, clicked my PH link.

This page was generated in 5.921 seconds.



That's unacceptable.

Assuming you haven't changed hosts since the last time you and I talked, I think it is your host that's the root of the problem.
I am on the same host with a barebones phpBB installation and a minuscule database of a 5.08 MiB, and I still experience excruciating load times now and then.
It's a function of being on a shared server with "unlimited" bandwidth and space.
From what I've read, our host is one of the most well-known in the budget hosting business and the slow service is endemic.
It's not as bad as GoDaddy, obviously (they're intolerable), but it's not great either.
Still, after coupon I paid all of $65 for two years' worth of hosting. I can't complain too much.

I'd rather you didn't prune the old threads. I sometimes cruise through them because they are interesting to me.
Or maybe you could create an archive area (a subdomain perhaps) that wouldn't get loaded unless it was specifically visited?

I would rather not prune threads, but those more than 6 months old are all messed up, and if I move to a new host, they all seem to have a 200MB cap on them. So I would have to prune anyway.

Wish I could afford a dedicated box, but oh well. I made some tweaks and apparently it hasn't helped.

This page was generated in 1.417 seconds.

works fine for me:

This page was generated in 0.275 seconds.

We should be getting page generated in 0.075 seconds type o times.

The site seems to load quicker on IE9 than FireFox7.