Hi Wendell,

I did have a short chat with my host who said it's the caching that's the problem. Apparently it's not very efficient.

Likely. If I recall it correctly Alex indroduced caching since Geshi turned out to be very slow.* It seems that you don’t use syntax highlighting in your forum. Maybe it’s worthwhile to have a look at some old code of mlf before caching was introduced.

[…] ZBBlock […] -- it did seem to help reduce some load times but certainly not a complete cure.

Maybe. Give it a try. It’s not complicated to set up.

I think with sites like mine with a bit more traffic, you have to be concerned not only about the threat of spammers, but the fact that they are constantly looking for a place with vulnerabilities. ZBBlock puts a stop to that.

I have ZBBlock on my site monitoring registration, login, and the contact form since Nov 2012 – see here. I had ~32,000 blocks last year. The nice thing with ZBBlock is that once an IP is blocked (three attempts) only an HTTP 503 is returned. Traffic = 0.

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* Edit: Wrong. It was already the BBCode parser class (see this post). Alex introduced caching in 2007-05-07 (mlf 2.0 beta 11). Last version without caching was 2.0 beta 10 (2007-04-20).