Hey everyone: this is hopefully improved now. An Amazon forced upgrade hosed all of our historical database settings and it's been a bit of rediscovery of what's required to keep things stable. Basically the forum software is greedy with database connections even though many of them do very little, so you don't need a huge server... just a specific setup. If you see those "SMF error" type messages, that's what is going on.
Unfortunately there's not much budget to scale with brute force, but I'm reasonably certain the same old tricks apply and we'll be humming along before long.