I'm thinking that the problem started back when RCU had excellent response characteristics. They custom-coded cute enhancements. They tweaked this and tweaked that. When someone made an offer to buy the website - great for the original owners - the new owners moved it to new servers - different hardware - different (untweaked) software. Then they drop this big ole modified turd into a new environment with (probably) zero documentation - surprise - all of the twiddles-n-tweaks don't work. All of the redundant and replication of data went down the toilet. The load balancing, what load balancing? Duh! Happens all the time. Why? Immature (or no) development procedures. God only knows "geeks" hate to document anything. They haven't for 40 years - why the heck start now? The only way that "we" the user community affect this mess is thru that wonderful metric call "hits". Pftzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

In the end, we get what we paid for! Just ask the guys flying ARFs. (just kidding).