@omnscient0 Thanks for the JSON links you provided a little while back, they've been pretty handy! How many developers does this site have? Does the DS dev team typically aim to do monthly updates to the site, or do you just update as necessary? Also, who wrote this site originally?
As a side thought, I've noticed that this site has slowed down a bit recently; maybe a bunch of extra load on this site comes from external manga sites crawling and downloading series that are published here (so that they can publish it on their own site)? Maybe a good way to reduce this load is to provide a download API on a separate server (from the UI servers), so that that traffic can be handled separately?
Edit: You don't have to answer ANY of those questions if you don't want.
I've noticed the dip in speed lately as well. Significant spikes in the time it takes to load pages in the reader mostly.
Direct downloads also seem to freeze and fail more often as well. I thought it was on my end, but if others have noticed it as well, it must be site-side.