For what it is worth, Hot Air had no problems. Maybe FR needs a live debate option which does not go to the main database. Just tracking a current comment feed is trivial.
Agreed - although one would think that during the debate, 95% of the traffic is on the debate thread anyway.
Somewhere between Mr. Browser and Mr. Server, more specifically between Mr. Internets and Mr. server (s) someone is doing more work than is necessary. Could not-db-related web server code, more likely DB connections and/or long running queries.
No images are actually being served from FR, so it’s just text. Other ideas are that perhaps tables need to be archived, could be trying to insert/update into large indexed tables ... but that starts getting into needing to know what DB is in use.
I’d be looking at my database and database interactions rather than hardware. SWAG.