I am now seeing faster response times from bitcoind.  It might have been a temporary problem. It still uses significantly more RAM and cpu than the old versions.  And I've never liked how much disk I/O bitcoin uses.  I'm wondering if I should setup bitcoind to run on a ramfs of some sort for better performance/reduced disk I/O (and be sure to mirror it frequently to disk in case of power loss)

also looking into the JSON RPC API, thanks