Just wanted to update with my experience:

I have the Off Topic forum bookmarked as it's the only one I post in anymore. I have not noticed any slowdown at all. None. Not when getting to the forum, not when reading posts, not when posting. It's all as fast as I could ask for.

However, yesterday I wanted to go to the "General" forum to see if anyone had posted about the empeg.com site there. Simply clicking on the "empegbbs.com" top-level navigation link left me waiting for at least a minute before anything happened. During that time I even opened an unread thread in Off Topic (since it was frozen on the screen for an eternity), and THAT took ages to load too.

Now, today, I'm back to only reading the Off Topic section, and everything is fine again. If I try to go anywhere else on the boards, I'm left waiting for at least a minute.

It doesn't seem like this is a case of the Off Topic forum being cached or anything. In fact, I recently cleared my cache. I don't know why the Off Topic forum would be so fast for me only because I go to it exclusively... Does that help at all?