It's like a miracle cure.
5:43pm up 37 days, 8:13, 1 user, load average: 0.76, 1.95, 6.84
Compare this to hovering around 100 earlier today.
I did two things -- turned on page caching, and forced getOtherNamespaces to return an empty array.
The site feels usably fast now, and the load average is a lot lower.
--Jimbo