Site Slowness

I've noticed the last several days that the site is loading very slowly after never seeing any issues at all with page load times. It doesn't matter if I'm trying to load pictures or the forum. Any issues?

http://danbooru.donmai.us/forum/show/49567?page=4

Yeah, so long as Hijirebe is down we are working at half-capacity, so some slowness is to be expected.

Server problems typically lengthen the "waiting for" and "transferring data from" durations, but during this current Hijiribe downtime, it has often been the "connecting to" phase that lags the most.

Would somebody care to explain in layman's terms why there are differences like this? Links to existing online articles welcome.

Servers cannot sustain an infinite amount of connections at the same time, so there’s a limit. If many (or all) connections take longer in the “waiting for” or “trasferring data from” phases, this limit is easily reached. I’m assuming that that’s what’s happening right now.

Hope that’s layman enough, as I don’t have an online article to offer.

kittey said:

Servers cannot sustain an infinite amount of connections at the same time, so there’s a limit. If many (or all) connections take longer in the “waiting for” or “trasferring data from” phases, this limit is easily reached.

So basically, I was "queueing" to be connected in the first place, while those already connected were "being served" as fast as the capacity allowed? That is how I understand your explanation. (Thank you for taking the time.)