Would anyone care to believe that the majority of the problems rise from 'popularity' as tye suggested as part of his post? I don't just mean popularity of the site by itself. Looking through some nodes, I've noticed many other methods of accessing the site that obviously add on to the load.

Methods of accessing the site that I've found (undoubtedly there are several others):

• The actual website; requesting pages (duh)
• Chatterbox Clients: There are quite a few variations of CB clients. I see a full-page chat, framechat, a java client, and command-line tools.
• The XML Tickers: On top of the chatterbox, some clients provide access to newest nodes, other users, the XP nodelet, etc etc.
• cblast35: A CB log, how many of these are now setup and how often do the damians request the data?

And there are most likely more to add to that list. Server load must be rising incredibly.