I'm sure this has been covered, but it is a little hard to search for.

Tournaments often languish for weeks (or months) waiting for games that will not affect who advances to the next round. If the players in the pairing have clinched advancing to the next round can we not have the tournament move on at that point? The games remaining would be played out of course. 

Is this a technical issue? A server horsepower issue? Is is considered poor form for the tournament to move on at that point?

Just to respond to the predictable "Just play other games while you are waiting. The tourney will finish in due time" posts. I do that already. That is no reason not to see improvements (at least from my point of view) to the system discussed.

Completely agree.

Previous discussion of topic (some time ago):

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/tournaments/speeding-up-multi-round-tournaments