It could indicate stability problems with your ISP. I also experience minor variations in the render time, but on much smaller scale, ranging from 0.5 seconds to about 2-3 seconds. Negligible, really.

On the other hand, I have serious problems with Impulse sometimes. Download rates vary from a 350+ kb/s to below 10 kb/s. Extremely annoying when downloading complete games or large patches.

It's been working fine for me since late yesterday.  A little slower when logged in than when viewing as a guest.  This page loaded in about 2 seconds as a guest and 5.964 seconds logged in.  Firefox also shows about 2 seconds as a guest, but the time went up to 29.513 seconds when logged in. 

In reality though, the page displayed fine within 3 or 4 seconds when logged in.  I'm not sure why the Stardock and Firefox timers show longer times.

Is anyone still having speed problems?  If not, this can probably be closed as resolved.

All, this post has shot into a tangent following a discussion of connections to all Stardock servers/services. The intent of this post was to showcase connection problems with the forums, specifically (as indicated by the Title). While I'm not going to (further) moderate out any of the replies made before this one, any subsequent replies **not involving connections to the forums** (ie. some forum address; for example https://forums.wincustomize.com or forums.galciv2.com) will be moderated.

If any of you would like to start or continue a discussion of connectivity to a variety of servers/addresses, please do so in a new post. The 'Forum Issues' forum and posts within it are for diagnosing, debugging and resolving forum issues. If any of you would like to review the moderation policy for the Forum Issues forum/category, we have them stickied here > Forum Issues Moderation Policy

@ M-203 - You might have already done this, but at the risk of sounding elementary, have you tried ipconfig /flushdns?  It's a long shot, but perhaps there are routers between you and Stardock that are adding to the slowdowns.  A new route night be a shot in the arm.

I only mention this because something similar happened to a network I administer when many clients got sporatic or lost communications.  Network collisions seemed to continue choking one particular section of the net for hours even after the server side was fixed.  At any rate, it can't hurt to try.

Beyond that, perhaps try a remote proxy and see if the problem continues.  At least that way, there would be more information to help come Monday.

Networks and networking is not exactly my thing.
How would I go about doing that?

@ Mumblefratz
It's not expired for me, it has been this slow for me since I discovered Wincustomize / Stardock a couple of years ago.
And it's not only these forums, but I can't say at this point what else is really slow,
otherwise someone will come in and delete my relevant post again!

This slowness, both on the forums, and the other slowness that I am not allowed mention,
are the reason I couldn't be bothered buying a Wincustomize subscription,
which, yes, I had been considering.

We were in the middle of investigating possible routing and networking issues with Cogent and Level2 when this had seemed to magically clear itself up. Our theories right now is that it was a combination of routing problems coupled with the firewall we're using. We think the firewall decided on its own to be incrediblydifficult and make it a pain for people to resolve (and download) bits of the forums which reside on other servers.

It's still a theory and it was such a problem that we're still looking into it to try and identify what the exact cause was, and to try and prevent it from happening in the future.

Good discussion all, lot's of great information in this post.

Ok, I did that thingy that MottiKhan suggested, and have now a different route,
and it appears to be a bit faster, however it's still what I'd call slow.

Here's the screenie of the route:

And here's the Tracert part of the deal:

NeoTrace Trace  Version 3.25  Results
Target: forums.wincustomize.com
Date: 15.09.2008 (Monday), 08:51:51
Nodes: 17

Node Data
Node Net Reg IP Address      Location            Node Name
   1   -   - 192.168.2.103   Hamm                Laptop
   2   1   - 192.168.2.1     Unknown            
   3   -   - 0.0.0.0         Unknown             Keine Antwort
   4   2   - 217.0.83.22     Unknown            
   5   3   1 62.154.16.165   Frankfurt am Main   f-ea5.f.de.net.dtag.de
   6   4   2 4.68.110.253    Frankfurt am Main   te-4-4.car2.frankfurt1.level3.net
   7   4   2 4.68.118.30     Frankfurt am Main   ae-31-51.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net
   8   -   - 0.0.0.0         Unknown             Keine Antwort
   9   4   2 4.69.137.50     WASHINGTON D.C.     ae-41.ebr2.washington1.level3.net
  10   4   2 4.69.132.69     WASHINGTON D.C.     ae-2.ebr2.chicago2.level3.net
  11   4   2 4.69.140.193    Chicago             ae-5.ebr2.chicago1.level3.net
  12   4   2 4.69.133.241    Detroit             ae-8-8.car1.detroit1.level3.net
  13   4   2 4.69.133.246    Detroit             ae-11-11.car2.detroit1.level3.net
  14   4   2 4.53.74.54      Detroit             i123.car2.detroit1.level3.net
  15   5   - 216.234.104.162 Detroit            
  16   6   3 209.124.63.234  Livonia             forums.wincustomize.com
  17   6   3 209.124.63.234  Livonia             forums.wincustomize.com

Packet Data
Node High Low  Avg  Tot  Lost
   1    0    0    0    1    0
   2    2    2    2    1    0
   3 ---- ---- ----    2    2
   4    7    7    7    1    0
   5   17   17   17    1    0
   6   19   19   19    1    0
   7   18   18   18    1    0
   8 ---- ---- ----    2    2
   9  110  110  110    1    0
  10  126  126  126    1    0
  11  126  126  126    1    0
  12  131  131  131    1    0
  13  129  129  129    1    0
  14  126  126  126    1    0
  15  126  126  126    1    0
  16  123  123  123    1    0
  17  124  124  124    1    0

And here's the original Windows Tracert output:

C:\>tracert forums.wincustomize.com

Routenverfolgung zu forums.wincustomize.com [209.124.63.234] über maximal 30 Abs
chnitte:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  speedport.ip [192.168.2.1]
  2     *        *        *     Zeitüberschreitung der Anforderung.
  3     6 ms     6 ms     5 ms  217.0.83.22
  4    96 ms    25 ms    15 ms  f-ea5.F.DE.net.DTAG.DE [62.154.16.165]
  5    73 ms   206 ms   206 ms  te-4-4.car2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.68.110.253]

  6    16 ms    18 ms    17 ms  ae-31-51.ebr1.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.68.118.30
]
  7    34 ms    36 ms     *     ae-2.ebr2.Paris1.Level3.net [4.69.132.141]
  8     *      115 ms   109 ms  ae-41.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.137.50]

  9   125 ms   125 ms   125 ms  ae-2.ebr2.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.69]
 10   125 ms   125 ms   125 ms  ae-5.ebr2.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.69.140.193]
 11   130 ms   130 ms   130 ms  ae-8-8.car1.Detroit1.Level3.net [4.69.133.241]
 12   128 ms   128 ms   128 ms  ae-11-11.car2.Detroit1.Level3.net [4.69.133.246]

 13   124 ms   124 ms   124 ms  I123.car2.Detroit1.Level3.net [4.53.74.54]
 14   124 ms   124 ms   124 ms  216.234.104.162
 15   122 ms   123 ms   123 ms  forums.wincustomize.com [209.124.63.234]
 16   123 ms   123 ms   123 ms  forums.wincustomize.com [209.124.63.234]

//Edited by Moderator - had some bad html

I also experience severe Forum slowdowns.

I can pinpoint it to the browser, however.

Every browser other than Firefox renders the forum as fast as you'd expect. Only Firebox browsers (on windows and Mac) have speed problems. I haven't checked the load times, but the site is slow even after it's been completely loaded. Scrolling is a pain.

PS: Try using google chrome, opera or IE. If it's noticably faster then start firefox, open the forum site, go to the firefox menu bar and click Help->Report Broken Website.

Just an FYI, and the database engineer is currently working on re-writing some of the queries behind the forums, as well as working on general performance improvements.  This may take a while, but when he's finished everything should run a little bit smoother

Bara