Yeah, I got a timeout myself earlier. We had a recurring problem like this last year, and it went away after the hosts migrated to a new database server. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) we are at the mercy of a hosting company and do not have a dedicated server. I'll log it of course, but it's usually temporary.
On an aside, we've been completely blowing the bandwidth limits, so I'll be seeking out the bots and spiders this evening to block the over-zealous ones. No idea if this could be affecting performance, but some of the Russian crawlbots have really been sucking the site down.
