Well, we tried really hard to make Amazon's S3 work for all of our static content; but at the end of the day it was too slow. [it is actually very fast, but there can be an initial delay connecting to it; which makes it seem slow for small files]

The lag that was previously seen when you visit your site and see only a styled site, with the images coming in after was due to S3 lag. Creating themes was especially slow as each uploaded file was transferred there as well; and whenever an operation is slow it can clog the whole network; all around it was working out poorly.

We stripped out S3 from most of our service now, user avatars and all of the theme data is now served locally from our webserver. This should result in a noticably faster experience for everyone. We will only be using S3 for the image galleries and for the file uploads section [which we'll be adding soon], which will be larger files where the initial delay to connect to Amazon S3 doesn't matter as much [S3 is very fast once you're connected to it]

*Note: Over 50,000 files had to be transferring from S3 to our local server, we've been checking and haven't noticed any missing files so far but may have missed some; if an image file is missing let us know