Well, the site’s back up. We had some somewhat unplanned downtime due to apache generating particularly huge (>50) system load.

Turns out we … well … still don’t know what the problem is, and it’s still there. I still think the disk is probably dying, but theplanet’s support staff insists that it’s fine, so we’re sort of stuck with it as it is.

We continue to look into other possible causes for the sudden and unusually high load, so the server may be intermittently unavailable. Please bear with our slow page load times as we try to track down this issue.

Update: see comment stream… apparently it’s actually the result of two pieces of spaghetti-code colliding :p