Typical LAMP applications, MySQL server is the weakest link. You can turn on the slow query log and find out what sorts of SELECTs are occurring and how long they take after a predetermined threshold, in seconds.
Can it cause users to experience slow downs? It most certainly will. In the right, um, undesirable conditions.
Amiga.org is interesting case because it does almost as many writes as it does reads. Well, reads will always be higher of course (Franko is on vacation I understand). And some of the most common requests can be cached and should be (like the front page loading).
Personally, only have had few searches get hung up, but try again and they succeed. That's a MySQL issue, not your connection, not PHP.
Of course there are other considerations as to the setup, hosting, hardware and a hundred other factors, so my recommendation as professional web developer is to reload the page.
:roflmao:
