>I like it when C obliterates my foot every now and then.

Once again reinforcing the stereotype that people who enjoy programming in C are masochists at heart.

In my experience, sudden unexplainable slow performance often ends up being a hard disk issue. Are you seeing a lot of hard disk activity?

People often assume that such problems are much more malicious than they actually are. I'd check to make sure DMA is still active on your primary disk and grab a copy your manufacturer's disk check utility.

I actually just took a job in software development on z/OS (the new hip, backwards-hat wearing mainframe operating system). Aside from the impressive clustering capabilities, we've got a lot of new and exciting stuff. (I personally am a big fan of AT-TLS) It's true that the systems are old and the interfaces archaic and painful to use, but the level of configurability and reliability these things offer is staggering. We have a few customers with 100% uptimes in the 20-year range.

My school (Northern Illinois University) actually is one of the few left offering full mainframe tracks in their computer science department, although COBOL was the most painful programming experience of my life.

I'd bet that my meta-group of 50 or so people has a median age of about 33, and while it is still the old dinosaurs who know the most, the definition of "dinosaur" in my personal, 15 person group is around 50 years old.