Yes, free members are especially prone to slowness. Our own ad server isn't much of a bottleneck, despite dealing with about 4 million or so hits per day (it serves both iHub and SI), but when we're not serving an ad from it, it has to make a call to our top-tier network and if they've seen you enough times to use up the ads they want to show you, they pass you to another network, and so on. Through about 8 of them. As the day progresses, a free user can really start seeing a slowdown. And gradually worse ads.
When you start seeing ads offering free xBox's or iPods, you've been on the site a while today. <g>
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