Still slow

I currently consider us to have no bug/feature fires actively burning, and so we are giving our full attention to the slowness issue now. It's so bad that, often as not, someone visiting the site for the first time gets the "Be back in a bit" error page, meaning that the FastCGI server running Planbeast took more than 30 seconds to respond to the request, and the controlling Apache server gave up on it. That's just unacceptable. (It happens more often to visitors who don't yet have our CSS and JS files cached locally, causing their browsers to make more HTTP request against our molasses-slow server.)