We just gave ourselves a performance boost
We have recently decided to remove all the little hidden tracking images, avatars, mybloglog and any other related items from the website. These have had miserable effects on the websites performance. Whenever one or more of these sites has problems it causes our site to be sluggish and some times not even load at all.
The intent of browserreports.com for instance is the tracking of the most commonly used browsers. Not something we really need here but it was interesting to follow for a bit. The one that is a bit unfortunate that we have to remove is quantserv which monitors our sites inbound traffic and was rather helpful for us but this one as well causes the site to load slowly.
It looks like the web services that provided these things for us just can not handle the load that they experienced and this is most likely the cause. Needless to say they have been removed and hopefully that should take care of the issues that we have been seeing over the past few weeks.