For the last few days (ok, off and on for the last 2 weeks). I’ve been fighting a case of the slows with the site. I’ve made sure it wasn’t the Wordpress install, the mySQL database or something strange in a plugin (or widget). And I’ve also been doing alittle admining in the shell and found numerous processes just sitting there holding time and doing nothing. I had killed a couple and instantly fixed the lock up, or so I thought. I have been in contact with Dreamhost support quite a bit, and we’ve been trying to track it down. Well today I got an answer and some hope.

[...]Your server is experiencing NFS errors - the connection between the web server and the file storage server is less then optimal. The load you may be seeing is inflated due to this problem, it’s not the actual load due
to usage on the machine.

The admins are looking into the problem and we are also doing a network
upgrade/maintenance tonight which should improve on the performance.
Please check http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ for updates.[...]