Smf is better but check http://fireboard.com/ .... It`s using smf and it will load in 30 minutes. Thats because it has many members.
You must have server problems too, what is your URL, 30 minutes is a hell of a wait, I am suprised you have members at all if I understand you right . Please provide URL I am interested now.
Sorry, I didn't quite get your statement. Do you mean that you are using Joomla Fireboard and it's taking 30 minutes (to load a page) because of high traffic ? That means, you are saying Fireboard has serious performance problems ?
I guess it's mostly server issue. B'cos I have seen SMF sites with real high traffic. And they load fast.
I have to agree with you. It's likely that the server is encountering heavy load. SMF should be pretty well-tuned to handle high traffic, basically if it takes 30 minutes to load, there must be serious problem with the site. Are you certain it's 30 minutes and not 30 seconds?
bbPress is a standalone package that can be integrated with WordPress. Some people refer to bbPress as WordPress forum plugin, but it runs without Wordpress. The same forum software is used on Wordpress.org support. It is easy to make it play nicely with WordPress and share features and database. bbPress Forum software SMF and PHPbb are packages bloated with useless features and compared to bbPress they both use archaic code.
i use smf and it is very very good - its free - no spam , and very nice skins (a lot of) phpbb is very very with spam - because there have software to do spam in phpbb forums.