[mhking]

That to me means a blockage of the system and possible overload of the server.

Unless the images in question are housed at FR, there is no extra load on their server. 95+% of all image-laden posts/threads are loading those images from elsewhere.

The problem FR has been having is tied (from what I can see) to inbound traffic jamming the server (potentially from a DOS or Ping attack - or it could be something more innocuous, even), or to overall traffic on the backbone routers that serve FR.

It's definitely not image-based. Actually, FR does one of the better jobs of image-handling that I've seen (and I've worked on several of the busier sites on the web).

[Grampa Dave]

Even if the server is speed re the images, don't we bottleneck the server when a lot of us are waiting for the images to load up?

I avoid some of the threads because they take forever to load on my new computer and it seems like forever to make a reply.

So am I in some server limbo and not causing a bottle neck while waiting for the these threads to load or to allow me to reply and not placing a load on the server?