A
portal is the area where two BSP
leafs connect. The
VIS compiler actually checks line of sight for the portal to other portals, not from the leaf interior to another leaf interior.
A portal file is generated separately by the
BSP compiler on successful BSP partitioning process (i.e. the map has no
leaks.) The output of VIS is the Potentially Visible Set (PVS), and stored in the BSP leaf data structure.
This relates to wpolys and r-speeds, because if you can see from one leaf/portal into others, then all the wpolys in the other leafs are drawn by the game engine and r-speeds are affected.
For your common gamer: A cutting-edge, extremely humorous game by Valve introducing the portal technique.