I added some smarter caching to the front page, which should make it load noticeably faster (and help ease the load on the database, which should improve responsiveness of the whole site). 

Also, we're rebuilding the search index as a stopgap measure to fix some of our more pressing search issues until we can get Solr working.  There are a total of about 87,000 items to index, and from the look of it, it's going to take around half a day, assuming that all of the items take the same amount of time as the first thousand or so (which they probably won't, but it's all I have to go on).  I believe I've managed to find and fix the problem that was causing new items not to be indexed, and I've also added some code to forcibly index art tags (which seem to have been indexed inconsistently until now).

I'll post an update when it's done.  Until then, searches might not turn up many results. 

Edit:  At the time of this edit, it's a bit less than half way done, so it's going to have to run over night.  I'll check back in the morning.  In the meantime, I apologize for any performance issues.