Hello Allen,
The problem is not in the social part of the process.
The problem is that a script like the upgrade of the message board, which runs over the apache and updates a large mysqld database,will block for 8 hours all the websites!
Last time I had to do my upgrade at night and it took 4 hours. During that time, the mysql of any other site on the host did not respond, and the server had high loads of over 15.
All this because of the Upgrade process!

Server? Xeon 1 Gb Ram