Just a heads-up that I plan to upgrade the virtual server at DigitalOcean that runs the Discourse app for TidBITS Talk. The site will be offline for at least 30 minutes, and it could easily be a couple of hours if making the backup before upsizing the DigitalOcean droplet takes a long time.
So don’t panic if the site is offline for a while!
Well, that was a lot faster than I expected. Now to see if the extra CPU and 2 GB of more RAM helps. (There may be a setting that is important too—checking with my developer on that.)
Not only was the upgrade faster than you expected, I can report that the site responsiveness is much improved.
Dave
Well done. Here in regional South Australia, the change in response time for opening a topic in a new tab has been dramatic. Now the tab opens in less than second. And I was blaming my equipment before!
That really seems to have done the trick. Site performance is excellent, and posting new comments seems nearly instantaneous, i.e., the previously observed five-second posting delay is gone. Thanks for addressing the issue!
Sometimes the answer really is just more CPU and RAM. 
I’ve now tweaked a couple of settings so Discourse can use the resources a bit better:
So hopefully it will be EVEN FASTER now.
Nice you were able to find two more unicorn workers. Difficult to source.
And no one ever thinks of the knock-on requirements, like more hay, extra stable room, etc. But worth it for the performance.