I am perplexed by all the people complaining that the boards are still slow since subscription came in. 98% of the time they run absolutely fine for me. And I work such weird hours that I am able to sample the boards virtually round the clock (on different days of course)
I would actually say that the board has been running smoother for me since the introduction of the Charter/Guest system. Both at work and at home, I’m on high-speed connections, and I used to lurk and need to take up to a minute or two for any given page to load. I signed up largely to continue lurking, but hoping that there might be dedicated servers for registered users not available to unregistered ones. It still ran slow. Then things switched to paid, and it almost never slows on me.
It’s been silky smooth for me. It doesn’t even do that “Page could not be found” crap anymore.
Is there still the oh-dark-thirty (about 4 am-ish Central Time) Board maintenance slow-down - been off here for awhile, so I’m not fully up to speed. I do find I have trouble from about 4 am to 5:30 Eastern Time. After that, the boards go along swimmingly.
Other than that, with any slowdowns, I figure it’s the fact that I am back on dial-up rather than DSL. (Hey, at least I am not paying long-distance charges each time I signed on since they put in a local access phone number.) Actually, the dial-up hasn’t (so far) been too bad.
I haven’t been able to find a time where it runs slow, either. That is, until the next Slashdotting. 
I was gone from the board for a few months (since the last vBulletin upgrade) because it was soooooo… sllllloooooowwww… that it was unusuable during weekday afternoons, which is generally when I log in. When I first subscribed I was a bit disappointed that things hadn’t seemed to have gotten any better, but after a few days they settled down and things are much faster than they were. It’s still nowhere near as fast as it is on weekends or late at night, but hey, I can read and post again.
Given the insanely low price for subscriptions I didn’t figure any new hardware was going to be purchased or anything; I figured it had just come time for the Chicago Reader to offset the costs of running the SDMB a bit. And I’m all for that. I almost wish they’d charged more.