Connection issues with RPOL.
A good way to judge if slowdowns are with RPOL or somewhere else in your connection to the site is to look at the bottom bar of the display...on mine, at least (Firefox browser), there's a little note in the center of the bar that says 'Generated in x.yyy seconds.'
On a 'normal' day for me, x is always 0, and .yyy is typically under .4 (and often under .2) When the connection issue/hardware problem hit, x was over 100, consistently. Since that number is generated by RPOL, it's a good indicator of whether any slowdowns are site-side or somewhere else (if it takes an age to load, but you've got a low generation time, it's not an RPOL problem...the site is running as normal, but something somewhere is slowing down transmission times of the data.)