I dont see the issue, however i'm probably the worst person to ask as i spend a LOT of time on here, so most is cached.
Whilst i cant explain these specifics, we have a little problem anyhow....
So - Every single picture, in every single thread is held on the server. If they are copied from another site, the image is duplicated here, and loaded locally.
The reason i took this stance is because i HATE finding threads on a site, and then not being able to see the pics since they have been deleted/lost, so therefore you end up with a half baked job.
This creates an issue though. We currently have around 5Gb of pictures on the server.
I could lessen the size of these - optimise them. However they would loose some resolution. I could offload them onto Amazon S3 and these could be loaded from there, however that means that we rely one something out of our control. And i havent looked if there are any cost implications yet. However i do know it is possible.
To be honest, the pics are original camera size (3-4Mb each) and even on my 100meg+ connection they take 4-5 seconds each to load. which from clicking on a pic to it appearing i dont think too bad.... Maybe i'm lucky though...
Most pics i post are taken on my iphone, and uploaded in "medium" quality - meaning that the average pic is less then 100kb - and they take less than a second to download...and the quality is nearly as good!
So - Back to your question JT. It's probably just because of the size of the pics posted!!