The forum is really laggy recently.

Interesting note:
I was trying to access the Wayback Machine, but it was unusably laggy (the page would load for eternity); I copied the IP of web.archive.org into an A record in my Cloudflare DNS settings, and now I can access the Wayback Machine via wayback.langdonstaab.ca.
It appears this "copy paste IP into Cloudflare DNS record to fix lag" works in general, not just for the LinuxCNC forum.

But why?

Weirder still, wayback.langdonstaab.ca redirects to web.archive.org, but without the lag (it's still laggy, but not so laggy that it's unusable).

From here it sure doesn't look like a DNS issue. 
It looks like a TLS handshake issue. As I mentioned earlier when comparing times to download the logo with and without http/https:

Here is a screendump of wireshark. The delay happens after the client (my Firefox) sends TLS Client hello. It takes sometimes a long time to get back a Server TLS hello up to a very very long time and even timeout. Right there. This time it took 17 seconds.
So the client has long ago gotten an IP address, any DNS queries was a long time ago. It's not DNS.
 
Even if I use the IP-address itself I get the same response. Later on firefox start to complain about certificate, but that's another story.
The network traffic and network delays are exactly the same with and without FQDN. So it's not DNS.

It must be that the traffic goes via cloudflare to the webserver instead of directly to the forum web server.
 
That was a surprise and rendered a bit of googling. QUIC protocol instead of TCP.
Of course, with so different network transport, no wonder one is faster than the other.
But why is the original TCP traffic so slow. Especially the TLS handshake?
 

Thank you sir for a detailed response. It confirms what others have said, it wasn't a DNS issue. It wasn't a routing issue, it had nothing to do with ROOT servers. It's the response time from the server hosting the forum.

forum.linuxcnc.org/36-using-this-forum-q...ntly?start=20#334837

DNS = Domain Name System = the things that converts www.linuxcnc.org that Internet has no idea what to do with, TO 69.163.143.134 that Internet can understand and route through ROOT servers to get to our server.
Think of it as a highway, our normal route is has to much traffic due to our provider having a single toll booth, LangdonS added another route with more toll booths.

Reposting as you either, missed it or didn't follow the link.
A ROOT server has nothing to do with routing.
www.iana.org/domains/root/servers

As I have stated before, my /etc/hosts file has a entry for forum.linuxcnc.org, so I do not need to contact a DNS server for resolve the address, ie my machine knows this without having to contact an external server. This the same file that resolves localhost to 127.0.0.1

If I disconnect for my network and try to ping the forum.linuxcnc.org I will get a
Destination Host Unreachable error
Not
Name or service not known

Which are 2 different issues.

Destination Host Unreachable is pretty self explanatory. This is not a DNS issue.

The second one comes from not being able to resolve a host name. This IS a DNS issue.
Now the other incorrect statement by yourself.

I am using his DNS for two days now, and i am also logged in the normal route, the normal route times out 60% of the time, this works with a bit of lag sometimes, but works consistently.

Using dig I proved that the server that resolves as the host with the FQDN is not providing any DNS services. You may want to have a look at this post made over the weekend.

forum.linuxcnc.org/36-using-this-forum-q...ntly?start=30#334860

You will see attempting the contact the IP address of his host has no response on Port 53, which is the used by DNS.

This post also shows it being a response issue by the forum.linuxcnc.org server.

forum.linuxcnc.org/36-using-this-forum-q...ntly?start=30#334863

Let's move on from DNS.

I googled slow TLS handshake and slow TLS Server hello and we are not the first. There are obviously many possible reasons.

- Too low (or rather the wrong) MTU setting on server
- Too low MaxUsers in Apache config
- Wrong certificate chain on server, especially includes a root certificate which should be removed.
- Running out of entropy on server

Since QUIC or rather HTTP/3 seems to work well, can the forum web site be configured for HTTP/3?

There may be more reasons. It could be interesting to do a packet dump on the server and compare.
Maybe the server finds it takes a long time to get the TLS Client hello packet?

Perhaps DreamHost just sucks.

Best wishes to all and I sincerely hope this issue is resolved and all current and new members are able to have a smoother experience using the forum.
Kind regards