So, some recent problems I've been working on:

1) Website/Frontend Database very slow (solved (I think))
I added some calls to a cache to avoid hitting the database.  This has improved things a great deal.

2) We were running out of available funds, which means we would pay with pending funds which can lead to a very poor user experience.  I've made a change such that once the available funds drops below a certain point Satoshidice will only process bets that meet our isLegit() check.  This check passes if the transaction is confirmed or if the transaction and all its UNCONFIRMED parents are known by Satoshidice and have a fee of at least 0.0005 BTC and if the depth of unconfirmed parents is less than 8.  This can lead to a delay, but I think it makes sense when available funds are running low to use them on the transactions most likely to confirm soon first.

3) We have had some things that have made me question the integrity of some of our databases.  As a recent example one of our internal reports of funds in accounts was off by several thousand BTC.  This is not good and led to the system thinking there was more funds than actually were there in our online wallet causing it to automatically send excess funds to an offline wallet.  This of course didn't help with problem #2 above.  I'll be working to track that down.  In the process of doing that there have been some outages in processing last night and this morning.  There will likely be more as I rebuild tables and do consistency checks over the next week or so.

SD has not "ran out of money." November was actually one of the best months yet for house returns.

Min was not raised to "screw people". See above post.

Sorry for the delays in responding here, I just returned from our trip to Macau/Hong Kong (Macau gaming industry is now starting to learn about BTC )

We've increased the max bet from .001 to .01 for two reasons:

1) Due to the fee of .0005, players who are betting .01 are going to lose no matter what. It is not wise to bet .001 when fees are paid.
2) There was a player recently sending tons of .001 transactions to SatoshiDice. This caused most of the delays players have experienced over the past few days. Whether it was malicious or not, it seemed smarter to just remove that tiny bet option. Any "strategy" that used small bets like that is a bad strategy unless fees were not being paid, and fees should be paid by anyone sending so many transactions.

Increasing the minimum bet might be a service for bitcoin as a whole. There'll be less satoshdicedust to bloat the blockchain.

There are currently 1374 bets that have been confirmed which haven't had their payouts confirmed yet:

http://pastebin.ca/2262402 (it's too big to include in this post - I never hit the 64000 byte post size limit before)

It looks like SatoshiDice is being swamped by thousands of tiny bets which they're not able to deal with in a timely manner.

The blockage was probably initially caused by a double-spend attempt, which can have a large knock-on effect:  when you make a transaction using a double-spent bet as an input, all the outputs are doomed to never confirm.  Each of the transactions which you subsequently make using any of those outputs are also doomed to never confirm.  And so on.  Before you know it you have a huge tree of payouts which eventually just vanish because they depend on a double-spent bet.

Eventually some kind of a clean-up script will run at SatoshiDice and all the missing payouts will be redone.

It kind of sucks that you're having to wait, but you're not alone...