You may have noticed the site being down (or just really, really slow) during a few hours about 1 day ago and off-and-on over the previous couple of hours. There was a run-away process on the DB server that has just been killed (thanks, Pair). It mostly didn't cause problems except that when the DB got a bit "behind" it would cause it to take much longer for it to "catch up" (during which time the site is very unresponsive).

We should be back to our regular level of slowness now. (: