Dunno if that's true, but the terrible performance was because it was running off a single box under Orkut's desk. He threw together a prototype in asp.net and launched it, with zero preparation for scaling. It took quite a bit of help from an experienced engineer just to get it split into pieces so that it could run on 2 machines.

A big reason that Orkut fell behind other competitors was that it needed so much work to port it to a scalable architecture while scaling up exponentially.