Thanks for your response. I'm not a server hardware expert, but I've used other busy forums that do not have the constant issues that plague HF, so assumed it was in part at least, a server hardware issue. Especially so since the problems have sky-rocketed since the migration.
I don't know the typical volume of users, but I have seen issues here on
regular days at irregular hours. I'm assuming that the bulk of the work is DB read/write and RAM and cache hungry.
I do know that Client side RAM usage appears higher than typical sites, and I'm speculating that is in large part to the advertising element, possibly the server is also burdened.