I go directly to the Forums menu, and it's loading really slowly tonight - 3-4AM EST - with one timeout.

Nothing but high-speed from here.

It hasn't been consistent... One time it's fast, and the next time it's infuriatingly slow.

Hopefully it's just a local aberration.

Over the past few days, I've experienced from time to time a delay in server reponse of the sort I previously noted in this post.

I am not encountering any difficulty here. When you experience the delays, what does it show at the bottom of the page in the "Generated in ___ seconds in which ___ seconds were spent on a total of ___ queries"? Right now, I'm seeing extremely short load times and very fast generation times; the page I'm looking at now says "Generated in 0.045 seconds in which 0.012 seconds were spent on a total of 9 queries," which is very fast indeed.