to increase the cache size (we've been working with the default cache size of 1000 so far, and this was starting to noticeable slow down things).

The new cache size is 8000, which should be well beyond the sweet spot (the point where the cache actually starts making sense because objects from the cache are reused before being flushed out by other weblog's objects).

There were 550 active user sessions on antville.org at the time of the restart (many of which may have been robots or expired, of course). Sorry for the interruption.

You should see speed increasing as the cache is filling up.

maybe it would be a nice service if such maintenance (server restart, downtime etc.) would be announced (if possible) via a message fed into every antville weblog using a special macro being placed somewhere at the top of the page skin...