I pay £60 per year (£5 per month) and I'm very happy with it :)
I get access to 4 CPU còres, 2gb ram and 30gb ssd storage (KVM VPS).
My forum has nearly 1.3 million posts :)
We've also had users mention that user tagging quickly flashes and then goes away too, we don't use Cloudflare.
I even installed the UI.X theme freshly and the flashing continues.
It appears this update has re-introduced the bug that's mentioned a few times in this thread where when you go to a new post the sticky navigation cuts off the first part of the post.
I'm running MariaDB 10 on a 2GB VPS, I have a large forum approaching 900,000 posts and rarely have server loads over 1.00 and regularly have over 200 people online.
It honestly made no noticeable difference to performance or resource usage.
Nope, I've used it in the past but didn't really see any benefit. I had no noticeable speed improvements over what I've got already even when using php 5.6.
Found a bug :)
If you have this addon enabled, when making a new post it doesn't seem to register you've posted in a thread so your icon is missing on the thread view to show you've posted in there. It's just the avatar icon that appears to not display.
it's possible that Apache is playing a part in this, what are your settings and have you considered nginx as a webserver to see if that helps with performance?