I'm a web developer and I KNOW that EliteFitness can't have the amount of hardware they claim to have. The reason being 1500 forum members won't slow down a forum to this extent or else the site owners are doing something extremely wrong.
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/index.php is a site that I visit quite frequently and they are running on a couple powerful servers. They have 10,000+ users during peak times and they are as fast or faster than EF...
you know what's scary? We may one day have to start doing something people used to do back in the days they didn't have internet access in every room of the house:
my attention span is too short for books. I read magazine articles and that's the best I can do. I've been reading Atlas Shrugged over 1 1/2 years and I'm only halfway.