Yeah, linked media should have zero effect on forum performance. Search functionality should have minimal impact as well. The best thing to save bandwidth and improve performance would be to limit what Guest users can view — as most of our traffic is from bots. That said, our current issues have more to do with server issues than with forum performance. Still, my preference would be to turn Search back on and instead limit Guest users to just the three main “Filmspotting” boards: Announcements, Comments, and Show Discussion. Also, it would be best not to let guests view the “Print” pages, which load entire threads all at once.
pixote