It's busy, simple as that. No fiddling, no rogue tech agents. Unfortunately we can't just flick a "go faster" switch. We did try painting some stripes on the box under BigTech's desk but it didn't seem to make a difference.
Seriously though, we can't make it faster overnight. We wouldn't choose to have it appear slow to you our dear users. MNHQ is aware that due to the ever increasing popularity of the site we're getting close to capacity and moves are afoot to do something about it.
In the meantime, the best thing you can do is NOT keep hitting refresh when it's slow. That's the worse thing and just makes it slower for everyone. Remember too that the speed of any website isn't just about how fast your broadband is or claims to be. For a start you share it with 50 other people up and down your street! If they're all downloading dodgy movies then your download speed will suffer. It's true that our server has been busy tonight though so even with fast broadband you'd experience a slow down.
Out of interest, did anyone see error messages (rather than just pages taking a long time to load) and if so, what did they say? Were they nicely formatted "MN style" pages or techie looking gibberish?