[lch]

I'd say it has stayed the same, too, not faster and not slower. Those other forums that you're referring to are probably another forum software. The phpBB3 software did get a speed tweaks due to a new implementation.

The question is what's the bottleneck, the processing time of the server or the internet connection / bandwidth. The server might be able to get a significant performance boost if a server side cache system gets installed like memcached / eAccelerator / APC. The culprit might be all those tiny images that make up a page, which translate to hits and might stall browsers that wait for the downloads, too.