The everything engine is a dog to scale. I've killed off eval(), and am normalizing a lot of the functionality to consistent APIs. Once we have a more skinny featureset, it'll be easier to add engine improvements, like having the nodecache be pre-seeded by a static JSON file, or a memcached/redis caching tier, or porting the site over the FastCGI to be done with mod_perl. It's a lot of cleanout, but it's necessary for the future of the site. The theory is that if the two code bases are close enough, you guys can steal those pre-hardened approaches and benefit.