A 'Who's Online" search, http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/online.php?sort=username&order=asc, shows that SFN is infested with spiders: MSNBot Spiders, Google Spiders, Google AdSense Spiders, and a horde of Yahoo! Slurp Spiders. I have noticed a marked decrease in performance from SFN as of late. Is this spider infestation the cause of this degradation?

I haven't seen any performance decrease, although I suppose that's subjective.

 

If you switch to this version of Who's Online, you'll see that the hits are not constant - they're around every 20 seconds or so, which shouldn't hurt too much.

 

Server load is also at a fairly low level.