In case you were referred here by the error messages I have heard about today, or were just wondering about the slowness, here's what's up:
We upgraded the database server, so that's going nice and fast (and isn't even using the other half of its upgrades yet), but now the webservers are the slowing down. We were hoping to have a webserver that failed on us a long time ago (not our fault...) back up and running on monday, but it didn't arrive.
The webserver should, however, arrive this week, and when Brad gets back from his vacation, it will be set up, and should relieve most of the slowness for a while. I estimate this will happen around friday or saturday.
Don't worry, this isn't a horrendous issue, we should not be dealing with this now, but everyone knows the issue with that webserver. We're finally getting to the point where we're completely ahead of the user load, so slowness and errors will become a rare incident.
In case anyone would care to budget their time a little bit, peak usage hours go between 3pm (est) and midnight (est), if you could budget your usage around this, you won't see any errors.
have fun,
-Dorm