What browser version are you using? And are you running lots of extensions in Firefox?
In the case of image laden websites, it's because of the number of external sites that need the DNS resolving and then connections opened to them and the files downloaded. It would be much better if I could host all of the files, but Vanilla doesn't really support that. Another reason why vBulletin whilst not as pretty as Vanilla would improve the overall experience.
A side effect of images being on other domains is that I (Vanilla) doesn't know the size of the images and so we cannot include the width and height tags in the image tag. This means that the browser will pause on rendering images as it will wait for the image headers to come down so that it can allocate the space on the page. It also means that the page appears to jump around as the layout gets adjusted to accommodate the images that it has fetched.
Anyhow, if you haven't yet tried it, give the Fasterfox extension a whirl. It will open more simultaneous connections to each server and this will in turn increase the speed at which the core parts of the page are downloaded.
It's still zippy here and the server load is low.
What browser version are you using? And are you running lots of extensions in Firefox?
In the case of image laden websites, it's because of the number of external sites that need the DNS resolving and then connections opened to them and the files downloaded. It would be much better if I could host all of the files, but Vanilla doesn't really support that. Another reason why vBulletin whilst not as pretty as Vanilla would improve the overall experience.
A side effect of images being on other domains is that I (Vanilla) doesn't know the size of the images and so we cannot include the width and height tags in the image tag. This means that the browser will pause on rendering images as it will wait for the image headers to come down so that it can allocate the space on the page. It also means that the page appears to jump around as the layout gets adjusted to accommodate the images that it has fetched.
Anyhow, if you haven't yet tried it, give the Fasterfox extension a whirl. It will open more simultaneous connections to each server and this will in turn increase the speed at which the core parts of the page are downloaded.