Hmm...seems that both you and joemikeb were "currently online" at the time you posted in the linked thread, but slolerner was not. I suppose it's possible that the lag is not actually in the loading of the avatars, but in the loading of
/forums/images/moods/default/content.gif (the "online" emoticon which immediately precedes the avatar in the page source)...or in the process by which the software determines that a currently-online viewer is currently online.
Independent test...Well, that seems to load instantly.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
I've looked at the avatars themselves and can find nothing about them that should be slow to load. The avatars are small, the system logs show no undue activity trying to access them, and there's nothing in any error logs that indicates a problem with them. I've just loaded the avatars directly and everything loaded quickly.
The hypothesis that the actual problem is with the "online" indicator is an interesting one. I'm going to keep an eye on how quickly the part of the script that checks for online users loads and see if there's anything in the way it executes that might be taking an undue amount of time. I'll keep you posted!
