I don’t know any specifics of discourse, but perhaps some extra caching on the webserver could make loading pages a tad more performant?
Btw: are the forum and patch-library sharing the same webserver? (ie. are compiles/request on the patch-library perhaps impacting the forum negatively?)
IDK if that’s related, but when I wanted to reset my password or sign up yesterday, the emails didn’t arrive for about 7 hours.
Yes agreed, it’s dead slow! I’ve tried some caching options but nothing seems to help.
The background is that we’re running an old bitnami discourse instance on AWS. It was never lightning fast and has been getting steadily worse over time.
I’d like to upgrade to a bigger server instance, and upgrade the server stack as well, but will need a quiet moment to do it properly, with a rollback path for when things go wrong.
The community server is completely separate from the patch library, they just share a single-sign-on setup.
And emails: yes the sidekiq service that does this stops occasionally, so we have a cron job to restart it automatically every night. Occasionally we get some annoying email downtime. Sorry! I’m hoping an updated server stack will fix this for good.
I’ve now upgraded the AWS instance, so hopefully now the community website will be fast and responsive again!
So far so good 
Slowness was pretty intermittent before, but hopefully now a bit more stable.
Upgraded the whole stack now. We seem to have lost the custom logos, and most user avatars… If you notice anything else not quite right let us know!
I had to re-upload my avatar (not sure if related)
Yes, it disappeared with discourse upgrade, it looks like user uploaded avatars are lost. There are a few threads about similar cases in discourse user forums, but we couldn’t find any recommended solution.
Email sending wasn’t working but should be fixed now. Question: are emojis back 
?
I can at least say that I think the slowness seems to be gone 
(which makes it way easier to browse the forum and respond. hopefully resulting in some more activity)