Yes.
The website would be more responsive if
- Avatars
- reputation-block
- thank-you-block
- signature
would be completely disabled for guests and crawlers.
Only displayed for members being logged-in.
This way usmb.com would also benefit from better search-engine ranking, as Google would crawl pages that have high density of actual content. Google gives a shit about who has how much reputation, for Google it is just Spam.
Also Google announced, that Website-speed will be incorporated as a factor to rank Websites in their internal ranking-mechanism.
Disabling these can be achieved with wrapping these template-areas into the
<if condition="$show['member']"> </if> statement.
For displaying these informations, it is used CPU and Ram of the Server and in-case of reputation-block very likely also additional count+join operations in the database.
If these are disabled for Guests and Crawlers, the stress on the website will decrease and such operations faster being executed for the real users - the members.
On Server-side, for example Apache there are only a specific amount of paralell worker-processes which serve as a gateway to the mysqld(Database) and php processes. It also spawns and ends these processes.
Dependent on the Server configuration a website can only serve pages to a specific amount of User paralelly surfing the Website. If additional users come to the site at same time, then they are delayed till a worker-process is free to execute their request.
We now already know that each request is being executed faster, if you disable these information-areas for guests. This means, that the configured amount of worker-processes will become faster free and available to execute new requests.
Practically, a website then can handle more users at same time without upgradeing the hardware of its server.
Only thoughts and some experience from my websites.
You can ignore.