It's less the growth this time around as implementing a couple new features that aggravated the load. And now they are having to backtrack code that was evidently poorly tested, rebalance the load, and find where the memory leaks are (because really, this is a mem-leak issue or I'm a monkey's uncle, based on how bad and long it is lasting).

On the plus side, it means I can feel better about NOT writing at all this month, since my platform is crash worthy.

(The sad side of this? FF.net pissed off a lot of its user base at the same time as AO3 started the performance issues, which means AO3 is not benefitting from FF.net's tomfoolery)