Re: BBpress faster than WordPress
You probably need to see a breakdown of queries between bbPress and WordPress to understand what’s going on. There may be a plugin in WordPress that’s causing it to lag for you.
But in general, bbPress 0.9 is faster than WordPress 2.3-2.7
It’s similar in concept WordPress 2.0 before it got bloated with too many “features” that should have been optional plugins.
bbPress 1.0 unfortunately will change that and slow down somewhat because of a radical increase in complexity and a doubling of the number of files needed to load to execute a page. Mysql queries will also increase by at least 50%
1.0 will be easier to cache however so that will probably compensate.