I looked around and didn’t see any explanation (feel free to point me in the right direction) but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t discussed already.
The forum seems significantly faster loading long threads and most noticeably my insanely full PM box. Not a little faster, but probably 5x faster at least over the last week or two.
Was a reason given for this? Has anyone else noticed?
I haven't really noticed up until you mentioned and I just took note, the forum loads really fast compared to the previous regular speed. My best guess is Theymos has done some upgrades and part of it could be that he adjusted the servers probably adding more. Caching improves loading speed and hosting on a fast server with like PHP 7.4+ and using OPcache can boost performance too I would have mentioned light weight themeing but this forum like other SMF have light weight themes. I'm very sure Theymos did some adjustments to the PHP codes for data sourcing also.