Thank you to all and I apologize about the occasional server errors throughout the day while I was making changes.
When we originally designed this site from a technical standpoint, we didn't necessarily optimize every single aspect possible as we didn't expect THAT big of traffic spikes from MFC. When Amber linked the ambox page, the Amazon EC2 instance struggled to stay responsive while 50-100 hits per second hammered the server. I spent all day today rearrange the code, adding in more caching, and even changing out the html template system. The goal today was squeeze every little ounce of performance out of our available resources so we wouldn't have to upgrade to a more expensive instance.
There's one more area to optimize on the ambox and "blog + twitter" page that will help handle the traffic spikes from MFC, but I want to see how the current changes hold up first. So if you see Amber link the ambox page and the site becomes unresponsive for a few, blame Amber for not waiting for the final optimizations. If the site is still responsive, thank me!
CLARIFICATION: All changes made today only affect the "blog + twitter", "me!", and "ambox" pages of the site - not the forums. So if the forums break, blame Amber!!! Hmm... actually... no matter what page breaks, blame Amber!