Things seem to be MUCH better now
The response time to the forum is consistent now with what it was "when things were working" (and that would have been months ago). The response is not instantaneous but feels like a server that might be a little off the highest speed trunks of the internet. That means opening a new topic takes a measurable amount of time but not so much that you think (or know) that the link is failing due to errors.
No database errors.
No "system unreachable" events.
Whatever you did seems to have fixed whatever the major issue was.