Actually, there are other theories we can chew on here.
The biggest clue is the USCHO forum's current online count. XenForo was reporting 23,687 users online: 9 members and 23,678 guests. For a forum with about 24,000 registered members and 2.9 million total posts, that guest/member ratio is extraordinary. That number is an activity-window count rather than necessarily 23,678 simultaneous TCP connections (not a session count), but it still indicates a very large amount of anonymous traffic.
This is apparently a known 2025–26 XenForo problem. Other forum operators have reported sudden waves of tens of thousands of "guests," apparently automated crawlers and AI scrapers, causing database load, slow page loads, and gateway timeouts. One XenForo operator specifically found that bot traffic against the search function was causing 10+ second delays when posting replies, editing, and deleting which is very similar to our issues here.
So, a mediocre DB config is likely being exposed by web scrapers and bots.