I don't know if it's an intentional throttling mechanism for the thread, or if the design of the site just doesn't scale to large threads somehow, but it has basically become a DoS to post to the Thread Locks Too Soon thread. The request appears to spin for several minutes (despite the payload being negligible) before typically getting a white screen of death. One time I received an error message that the attempt to acquire some resource timed out. Is this some kind of locking mechanism failing? DB engine shortcoming or something? It seems kind of silly that the weight of a thread would impact the performance of posting to it (since in practice it should just be appending a record to a [locked] file).

That's probably true, Edgar. Though to be fair, that could be delayed on a separate thread and update the post with the details after. I wonder if I update the post with the thread details already filled in if it'll just insta-post!

Append:

Confirmed. If I replace the markdown with explicit quotes it posts instantly! I didn't setup the thread properly to give cookies, but you get them anyway Edgar!