Well, I woke up this morning to find out I was Slashdotted thanks to Thomas Hawk's post, and my hosting provider's server was chugging hard. (Hey, I pay for this myself, blog in my own time and chose a top-rated provider). After getting back to Seattle today I've made some updates including a build of DasBlog 1.7 (coming soon to SourceForge) with better caching which seems to be doing much better.