I finally figured out a way to speed up the pernormance of the main Forum pages.  For example, if you select Pick 3 from the Forums drop-down menu, it used to take at least 5-7 seconds to display the page.  Now it takes less than a second to build the page.

The reason the Forum pages have been slowing down is the sheer number of messages in the database, plus all the features that appear on the page.

It took some clever SQL programming, but that's the fun part anyway!