Well aren’t you blessed not to experience the extremely slow FreeRepublic...only took three minutes to post this from the time I keyed in “reply”.
I guess you can consider yourself a part of the “1%” that hasn’t experienced multiple problems here.
I do need to add that I run Linux with Firefox 16.0.2 compiled from source code with the "-march=native -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" gcc optimization flags. And I run my own nameserver with a routing enhancement (based on Dijkstra's algorithm) to find the most efficient path to Free Republic. So, I'll confess that it may be a combination of those factors that result in FR being as dependable as a privately-owned water utility. Still, the benchmarks taken over a period of time do show a notable improvement for this site.