The amount of views the articles receives is an effective DDOS on our server which is possibly why it's been slower and less responsive recently.
There's a small group of IP's which are the culprits, which I've banned from our server and have currently no intention of unbanning.
The user in question has not accessed our website as far as we can tell with any of the IPs in the DDos. We'll be monitoring the situation though.
I'm also currently working to change the article view count to be based on unique IP address views which should stop similar situations in the future. Please bear with me.