I haven’t actually gotten any timeouts, but this morning when I clicked in to open the board, it took a good 30 seconds to load. Accessing this page to post took over a minute.
I saw a post yesterday from someone (was it Siam_Sam) that he got a timeout.
I haven’t noticed any slowdowns, though I mainly read and post on a fast computer with a direct-wired 300 Mbps internet connection. However I also read the board quite a bit on a cheap Amazon Fire tablet with a moderately crappy wireless connection, and while a lot of page loads are noticeably slower than on the desktop (the spinning circle sometimes appears for up to several seconds) it has never been intolerably slow. Someone did mention that Discourse updates frequently and can run slower for a few hours afterwards.
One thing I’ve noticed that I’ve never seen before on any other site is that Adblock Plus on my desktop Firefox browser sometimes shows very large numbers of items that it claims to be blocking on the SDMB Discourse site, which couldn’t possibly be correct. It’s typically just 1 or a handful, but right now it’s showing 50 and I’ve seen it as high as 110. These oddly high readings don’t seem to be associated with any slowdown, though, but they’re puzzling and seem to be cumulative, at least for a period of time. Since it doesn’t really impact anything I haven’t been paying close attention to it. It’s most likely some Adblock anomaly but it only happens on this site.
As I discovered on my own thread about the topic, modifications to the site software to suit your personal taste can cause slowdowns. In my case, it was only for the Categories screen, and it happened because I “muted” all the categories to make the page shorter. It only affects that one page, and I try to use it only once per session, so I don’t mind the trade-off. Your case is different and more widespread, so this probably is not what is happening to you, but I am including it for general information.