Avatars are probably the least of the problems
While I like to think that an avatar-free Discourse would be significantly faster, it seems that even when ~60 avatars are being served that it’s only around a 0.6 second problem (meta.discourse.org testing via webpagetest.org). Though I am surprised to see how long meta.discourse.org takes to load given that it’s Fastly powered? A ~6 second load time wasn’t what I was expecting.
I’ve also just set-up my first Discourse site using a Digital Ocean droplet and was hoping for better performance results.
Regarding avatars @sam, could the the default Letter Avatars (when a user has no avatar image set) be a HTML+CSS version and not an image, saving a bunch of HTTP requests? I know the meta.discourse.org has a high ratio of avatared users, but for many forums with non-tech people, they have a much higher % of non-avatar users.