it is my understanding that if you go to settings and set your number of posts to a lower number, it will load faster
and this is independent of the length of the thread itself. i believe this
is the reason John made the software do this.
i have T-1, so i leave it at 250. the large (in bytes) pics slow down loading, especially
if they are hosted by a slow server where they reside. (i proved this to badjoe yesterday morning).