@ivan thanks. Let me know if you want me to participate in any tests. That's probably the best I can do to help. Doubt if I can find a root cause...
@ivan as I mentioned, I want to try to deploy a Bonfire instant in my geographical neighborhood. When I do that, I will try to instrument it a bit to measure different interactions that seem slow to me and see if I can spot some low-hanging improvements. So far, the big slowdown seems to be whenever a bunch of posts are collected and presented, as in Activities, Posts, or Discussions.