Sorry, these users' disk and CPU were not at 100%. It is clear the bottleneck is not the database or indexing, for many users.
It seemed to me that it was some sort of disk problem or network condition on his end. Some selected quotes from my IRC log:
also, when i woke up, there were thousands of entries in the debug.log that look like: trying connection lastseen=-135.6hrs lasttry=-358582.4hrs
How many connections do you have?
2 right now
How many blocks do you have?
blockcount and blocknumber are 29124
How fast is that increasing?
around 1 every 4 seconds
manveru: 32-bit or 64-bit linux?
64
now 'blkindex.dat flush' takes a few minutes :|
still hangs on flush
manveru: Are you on some network file system?
no, just a normal harddisk
it's only 5200 rpm though
Also, replacing the blocks might have prevented him from noticing a transaction:
jgarzik: sent me the blocks, but it didn't change my balance
manveru: in your getinfo you're at block 94236 ?
yeah