Why the site is loading so slowly?

[sf42]

It has been like this since I joined, you get used to it

[Kerlingen]

As you might be aware, this forum is hosted in China. This means both from Europe and US you will have at least a 500ms (round-time) ping. If you're outside of the PRC and try to access websites hosted inside all traffic has to pass the "big firewall" twice (request and response), which makes the connection even slower and some packets might get dropped or even give a short ip address ban. This probably isn't you fault, but your ISP's router sending your packets together with "suspicious" packets from other users.

If users accessing this forum from inside PRC have a normal speed and ping, this would be a possible explanation.

For me (Europe) the forum usually loads in less than 20 sec, but sometimes isn't accessible at all.