What I suspect is happening here is that the set-up here is something like this.
Fluther is made up of multiple servers. As far as I know there is a load-balancer, two Apache server. and a database server.
When you make a request to Fluther there is a server that takes your requests (load-balancer) and then it randomly picks one of the two Apache servers and sends your request off to that. If one of those servers is having problems it will hang (ideally it gives up and tries the other server after a bit). That is why reloading the page will sometimes result in a pretty fast page load. It is all random.
And I wouldn’t really give them much shit about this. Apache can pretty easily go bonkers and kill a server. That is why I have my server reboot every night at 3am. It is on a SSD and takes under 30 seconds and eliminated Apache weirdness. Not ideal but cheap and easy.