What we noticed is that the media on the site is the main performance dragging culprit. Since we serve a very robust site with a bunch of inline wiki editing tools, custom forums and image functionality there is a ton of site-specific CSS and Javascript powering everything..... these are the files that are needed for pages to render and these files are large. So, last night we completed phase I of our performance enhancement by adding a new step to our media deployment script. We're now crunching all of these large js/css files during deployment to our prod boxes.

We pushed GiantBomb last night and we immediately noticed a pretty significant improvement in performance here at the office.