Some observations on the recent lag situation.
After
ten minutes of trading since they dropped pending orders at UTC 21.00
(that's when lag went from 50 minutes to zero), lag was back up to
8 minutes 47 seconds.
From this, we can estimate that they are recieving around like 800% to 900% more orders than they can execute.
MtGox's trading engine is
congested.
(This is a separate problem from the recent, ongoing DDOS attacks.)
Meanwhile, the surplus,
"pending" orders get placed in a buffer.
This buffer has some finite capacity.
As long as incoming orders > 100% capacity, lag will
increase without bound, tending to infinity.
This is what traffic congestion looks like, MtGox's current situation is somwhat similar.
They will have to clear the "pending orders" buffer periodically until things cool down.
Pending orders
will get wiped.
Mt Gox is currently situated on the fourteenth floor of an office building, IIRC.
They need the entire building. They need something like this:
You cannot put MtGox in the cloud, for obvious reasons.
So, in a sense they're right. This "success" is killing them.
There are no easy solutions.
The situation is well and truly fucked up.