Close enough, the hived was getting clogged up by bad traffic (the cards), so it couldn't handle even the good traffic (dust).

And although I didn't mention it in the post, perhaps surprisingly, even the bad traffic processes better without having the read-only traffic on the same node. The two types of traffic don't mix well due to some weaknesses in hived's current database locking mechanism.

HAF-based applications will help a lot with this latter issue too, because most of our read-only traffic will be migrating from the hived node to the HAF node. We've done this a lot already with our earlier optimization work on hived and hivemind, but HAF will allow us to migrate more API calls away from hived nodes so that they can focus on their primary job which is processing transactions.