I'm going to need to look at moving the VPS hosting for this. My current provider quietly set a status of "degraded VPS performance" 5 days ago, and has frozen updates to VPS configurations as well. This means I can't scale. In context this seems to explain *why* they ignored my last request to scale the VPS a month ago. 

 I'm guess the fact the instance is struggling again after queue purges and service restarts is due to their infra issues.  I'll monitor and keep things as stable as I can while I look at options.