I have no former experience using SMF so I can't compare my current results to anything.
I have certain tasks which seem to take quite a while to execute, mainly Paid Subscription Checks, Daily Notification Summary & Optimize Database
I'm running SMF 2 RC2 on shared environment, MySQL 5.0.87-community, PHP 5.2.9 and my forum currently has 14 052 posts, 893 topics and 241 members.
Optimize Database - January 27, 2010, 02:03:29 - 124 seconds
Optimize Database - January 20, 2010, 02:04:03 - 160 seconds
Optimize Database - January 13, 2010, 02:01:25 - 51 seconds
Optimize Database - January 06, 2010, 02:00:22 - 18 seconds
Optimize Database - December 30, 2009, 02:03:10 - 52 seconds
??? you think that's a long time to execute? Heck, I have a board with 2.3 million posts and 35,000 members. it can literally take HOURS to run a db optimize with that... (the database is over 4 GB at this point)