Theymos (main bitcointalk admin) is seeing very high traffic to the forums: 250 requests per second. He thinks this is legit traffic, not a DDoS: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172672.msg1799471#ms...
Maybe they should start to use an SSD and some decent software.
Theymos has been improving the forum software, and is offering bounties to people to implement certain things.