Also, please remember that the majority of users on here upload their avatars to this site, which are hosted on the PF servers....

So when you have 18748, and lets say, 18500 of em upload thier 5k avatar to the PF servers - thats 92500k in hosted images alone.... And when you have 50 posts to a page, thats 250k downloaded from the PF servers everytime the page/thread is opened...

PF is free for all to use, but bandwidth cost money - money that Stu @ Petrucci graciously put up themselves (with the help of sponsors and trader fees) for use to use