There's not much in the spam thread other than text and youtube videos most of the time, so I don't think loading time's much of an issue.
If you think Arpegi is down, then all you have to do is contact one of the admins or one of the members who have an admin's contact for confirmation. Since the current community is pretty tight-knit, I don't think this is much of an issue either, for now at least. There's also the option of using
http://www.isup.me/ for confirmation instead, though I'm not sure of the reliability.