The short version of the story is that there were about 10 different things wrong with the server.  Some of those things were configuration issues, and some of them were database tables getting out of hand.

We tweaked file system caching, we tweaked file system journaling, we tweaked the mariadb connection timeout, we tweaked mariadb memory allocation, we tweaked a couple Drupal modules, we fixed an out-of-control spam problem that was elsewhere on the server, and I'm sure we did some other things that I'm not remembering at the moment.

Load average has gone from about 18 to a balmy 1.7.

We'll see how things hold during peak hours, but right now things are looking a lot better.  Again, sorry for all of the issues lately.

Peace,

Bart

I've converted the vast majority of the glitch assets to SVG and uploaded them.  They can all be found in this collection here:

http://opengameart.org/content/glitch-svgs

Note that there were a couple of sets that were problematic.  The overlays set converted so poorly that it's not worth uploading, and the wardrobe assets (as can be seen in the preview) had some pretty major issues as well.  There are also a few random files that I just couldn't get to convert without crashing Illustrator.  I don't really have time to root out the remaining bugs in the conversion process, but, as I said, the vast majority converted successfully, so there's a lot of excellent art to work with.  If anyone wants to identify and convert the missing files, please feel free to do so, and I'll be happy to update the assets.

A big thank you goes out to Tiny Speck (for these amazing assets) and all of the people who helped me with the conversion process!

Bart

P.S. Due to the large number of Glitch submissions, some of you may have missed the recent set of submissions by chabull.  I urge you to check them out.