I removed the trail backslash and the 301 went away.

However this caused a weird side effect.  Performance went to c**p.

bbPress is load testing with a response time of 1300 ms

wpForo is now 37,000 ms.   
wpForo WAS twice as fast, and now super slow.

Very strange side effect.  *sigh*.  Back to the drawing board.

Put the backslash back and its still slow.  So a coincidence.

Checked the slow query log for Mysql.

Suddenly its doing full table scans when reading threads and taking 40+ seconds. Ouch.

 User@Host: node5ZDc59hppy[node5ZDc59hppy] @ localhost []

# Thread_id: 99  Schema: wwwnode5com  QC_hit: No

# Query_time: 40.561315  Lock_time: 0.000166  Rows_sent: 15  Rows_examined: 700743

# Rows_affected: 0

# Full_scan: Yes  Full_join: No  Tmp_table: Yes  Tmp_table_on_disk: Yes

# Filesort: Yes  Filesort_on_disk: No  Merge_passes: 0  Priority_queue: Yes

#

# explain: id select_type table type possible_keys key key_len ref rows r_rows filtered r_filtered Extra

# explain: 1 SIMPLE wp_wpforo_posts ALL topicid_status NULL NULL NULL 233576 233576.00 100.00 100.00 Using temporary; Using filesort

# explain: 1 SIMPLE wp_wpforo_topics eq_ref PRIMARY PRIMARY 8 wwwnode5com.wp_wpforo_posts.topicid 1 1.00 100.00 100.00

#

SET timestamp=1493056604;

SELECT DISTINCT `wp_wpforo_posts`.*, `wp_wpforo_topics`.`private` FROM `wp_wpforo_posts`, `wp_wpforo_topics` WHERE `wp_wpforo_posts`.`topicid` = `wp_wpforo_topics`.`topicid`  ORDER BY `wp_wpforo_posts`.`created` DESC LIMIT 15;

Temp tables and full scans.  Not sure why. Hmmmmm.

Im so close to getting this to go really fast! ugh

Found the issue.

The side bar RECENT POSTS widget is running this query:

SELECT DISTINCT `wp_wpforo_posts`.*, `wp_wpforo_topics`.`private` FROM `wp_wpforo_posts`, `wp_wpforo_topics` WHERE `wp_wpforo_posts`.`topicid` = `wp_wpforo_topics`.`topicid`  ORDER BY `wp_wpforo_posts`.`created` DESC LIMIT 15;

Which causes a full table join, full table scan, and tmp tables in MYSQL. This type of unoptimized join just isnt going to work with big sites. 

This really need to be re-engineered guys.

Without the sidebar widget im happy to announce I got wpForo running in less than 1 second when reading threads now.

Awwwww yeah, system load down, wpForo much much snappier!

Need that sidebar widget optimized so I can put it back though  😉