From time to time apache on pliny will start eating up all available memory and everything slows to a crawl. Restarting it properly sometimes requires a kill -9 (via the apache-kill alias) to kill off the old one thoroughly.
In an effort to track down the culprit, I've disabled mod_throttle on pliny. If we still have problems, we'll know to look elsewhere...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)