Speed/request time out issues

This one I can answer quickly. We were having some trouble with another site on the same server (the French Issuepedia, as it happens) being bombed by spambots, causing server errors and slowdowns for everyone else; I've locked that site down since it is no longer being maintained, and also tweaked its robots.txt file to reduce the load from web-spiders.

As it happens, I'm also in the process of lining up a higher-powered server. I don't have a firm timeline on that, but I'm guessing sometime in the next month or two.

Feedback like this is useful, as it is sometimes difficult for me to tell whether the site is being sluggish or whether it's just my (overloaded) computer being sluggish. I am also interested in any suggestions that might improve participation, to which this is certainly related (as you observed).

How does the site seem now? It seems faster to me overall, but still with the occasional glitch.