Page Loading At VEF
 

Peculiar problem only at VEF; it has been happening to me for at least a year now:
It seems whenever I open a page, what used to take only seconds to load now takes minutes.
If I open multiple tabs, it can go on for 4 or 5 minutes before the pages are displayed properly.
Though when one pages loads, they all do; all at once it seems.
Wonder if it can be an image host problem, but not just one filehost is loading is it?
Strangely enough, it only seems to happen in the 'general modern topics' section.
Such a sharp contrast to times past...

You could use the developer tools of your browser to trace the network requests.
On firefox the tools are available via menu: Tools -> Web Developer -> Toggle Tools.
Switch to the network tab and reload the page. There you can see what requests are sent and how long they take.
Often the culprit is a third party tracking script. If you can identify a third party object or script try to block it. For example with uBlock.
This is also useful to improve privacy: identify and block as much tracking objects as possible. Most important facebook and google.

Here is a screenshot of the developer tools on firefox. They are similar in chromium/chrome. I don't know about safari.

https://thumbs2.imgbox.com/39/e0/LfmEYJDR_t.jpg

Thanks - didn't know all that, and there are so many things listed it can be quite scary not knowing who's 'looking in' on you.

Yes it is scary. And it is getting harder to avoid being tracked.
The worst are the facebook and twitter like buttons. They are used to track users across sites.

And now more and more sites load scripts and fonts that are needed to display pages correctly from centralized sites, e.g. google.

Here is an interesting read about bloated web pages:
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm