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Stack Overflow does this well by automatically making it read only mode when they are having issues.

to be fair... the stackoverflow tech team requires stackoverflow to restart the company

(along with the rest of the world)

Hehe, true. Good that it isn't down. FB got a place to resort to.

Do you have any idea why it's so much more responsive?

Anonymous pages are cached.

When logged in the site shows you for each entry (post/comment) whether you voted on it or not, thus it has to request a store with per user unique data. (Also custom color, your points, ...) When logged out all get the exact same data.

Probably because it can be cached instead of serving customized pages

On Firefox you can use containers. Two tabs, one logged in, one logged out.