For last three days, you would have observed deteriorated performance on Indian Kanoon. That has mainly happened because the major search engines have significantly increased their crawling of the website. The server is handling a lot more crawlers than it was handling earlier. The end user is almost competing with the bots to get database access and as a result you would see the error sometimes.

For temporary relief I have added a crawl delay parameter for the bots. Most likely the search engines will slow down their crawling soon. However, this is not going to be a long term solution.

The software stack is still not very well optimized and probably we will see a lot of performance improvement by fine-tuning the algorithms. One aspect of performance is to fine-tune relevance and the corresponding document tiering algorithm. That will speed up those costly queries that match a lot of documents. This is clearly one work of primary importance.

Postgres 9.2 is going to be released soon and is featuring major performance improvements. Robert Haas has significantly improved lock contention in Postgres that will significantly improve the performance while serving a lot of clients. http://rhaas.blogspot.in/2011/07/read-scaling-out-to-32-cores.html

The load on the website is increasing and it would be important to throw more hardware to serve the load. A new powerful server is planned and the two of them will share the load. The new server will be placed in India to provide quicker response on search suggestions.

Hopefully, the temporary and the long term solutions are going to alleviate the performance issues.

Can the cases cited on your site be downloaded and cited as caselaws in the courts?