[admin (no pm's please)]

I can't clearly get to the bottom of the problems we saw Friday, but I'm inclined to the view that there may have been a few contributing factors, a syntax error in a script that may have caused php caching problems, some load spikes from statistics processes on the servers, and last but not least there may have been increased network latencies due to problems else where in the network in the datacenter.
Two of the issues have been resolved and a few further tweaks made that should also help reduce load across the board. I also plan to move the gallery system away from the main servers.