Here's my two hundredths of a dollar...
The fact of IRC is that all servers get clogged with people and
therefore become slow or split. Splitting is where a server is so
overloaded that it actually throws many of the users off as a kind of
knee jerk reaction to "weight". So the neverending quest is to find a
good strong server to use. I've found a one to use on the EFNet network
called ionet.irc.com .
Steven Rimlinger
("eggzakt" on IRC)