*very* slow site

[Darkness]

Site's been rather slow for me lately. Today, it's even worse, with database errors and 504 gateway time-outs being really, really common.

 

[Scott DeWar]

Its a little slow, but no 504 timeouts.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

The past two days, the site's become incredibly slow for me. It takes anywhere from 1 - 5 minutes to load a page, in some cases having to Reload the page one or several times after getting 504 Gateway Timeout errors. Just getting to the 2nd page of this thread took over 10 minutes and 5 reloads. What happened? How do I disable these scripts and ads?