The technology behind the repository itself is not great. (DSpace[1]), add to that the factor that it is not actually build to handle this many requests and scaling quickly is out of the question too because of the server set up.

Even without issues, it often felt a bit sluggish when serving locally. The pages are quite large, and the whole pipeline from content -> webpage is rather tedious.(Java, XSLT -> html)

It shouldn't have happened - but I assumed it would.

disclaimer: I am a former contributor to the project [1]: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace