ArcSDE all of the sudden slow??

Hey folks...I have run into this issue twice in the past couple of weeks. 2 public access sites that we developed, all of the sudden came to a screeching halt. For some unknown reason, certain layers would start to draw extremely slow, and bogging down the entire application. Looking in the ArcIMS logs it was pretty easy to see the slowness. Layers that previous had a sub second draw time were now taking 30 secs+ to draw. After lots (and lots) of trial and error we determined the cause to be due to different ArcSDE service pack levels.

Yes, I know that ESRI drills it into our heads that we should always keep everything at the same service pack level, and now I really believe them. What was happening was this...An internal-only instance of SDE was creating SDE export files and pushing them to the external instance of SDE. The internal was at SP4 and the external was at SP2.

After upgrading the external to SP4, this bizarre behavior disappeared.