Tammy
As we mentioned in dozens of topics, the software and it's features have been enhanced and optimized gradually, step by step.
We agreed upon newsfeed and photos plugins being the heaviest features of Oxwall.
In cases, when your websites start to grow and attract more traffic, unconditionally, these features may and will cause additional load to the server that may and will cause the speed decrease.
At the same time, this can serve as a signal to you, that your server is not able to handle such load and you should consider using more powerful dedicated servers with greater capacities to process and handle this additional load.
Newsfeed is one of the most complicated and heaviest features in the software. We accept that. It's refactoring requires a lot of human and financial resources. We do our best to address all vital issues and requests from our members. However, again, we cannot drop all our duties and address only this problem.
Let me note again, that this is an open source software and Oxwall is still a small team. Besides if you get more traffic that means, you're doing great money wise, therefore you can hire some third-party developer to address this issue directly on your website, which you can share lately by contributing to our public oxwall repository.