@Tarun - you got that performance boost just by adding those lines to the root .htaccess?

My .htaccess file is completely empty - is this normal?

There is no problem, its only settings that overrides the ones in Apache. I disabled htaccess on my server. Everything is inside the apache conf file. htaccess is a performance killer.

Do you have your own server or do you have a hosting provider? 

I have a hosting provider and I'm not sure what I can and cannot do to speed up the loading times ...

I have my own server. For hosting providers you need to use htaccess, because you don't have apache config access.

So, eventhough it's currently empty - I just copy/paste all of the contents from OPs first post and test if it's any better or if I get any errors?

Should I change anything or is copy/paste sufficient? I'm thinking I can't do much harm, since the current .htaccess file is empty. If anything stops working, I just delete the contents of the .htaccess file and I'm back to where I started, right?

I've noticed there are several other .htaccess files in other folders:

I should probably leave these unchanged?

 

@Tarun - you got that performance boost just by adding those lines to the root .htaccess?

My .htaccess file is completely empty - is this normal?

Yes I did. You can download the pre-made .htaccess file and make the necessary edits as you wish. Simply upload it to your forums root. But as a bonus, the speed boosting lines will also work with other CMS softwares and webpages.

I tried this and gtmetrix says I went from 58% to 85%. Pageloads felt quite faster too ... for a while. I think it's just behaving differently. The page is blanke a couple of seconds and then it appears all of a sudden.

I'm in contact with my hosting provider. There seems to be a CPU issue - only my account on the server keeps reaching the CPU limit ... They're looking into it.

buri use cloudflare to help ur host offloading additional resources to cloudflare so ur host got less stuff to process

I'll look into cloudflare. I have to admit I don't know how and what it does... Thanks for the advice - I'll give it a try and report back.