Thank you very much !
I'm trying to automatically compile a status-report for german language content.
I was using the public API node.steem.ws to gather all data from the last 24 hours.
It was so awfully slow, that it would have taken almost another 24 hours.
Then I remembered, that I had seen a post by 
gtg.steem.house runs a full node with a public steem API
node.steem.ws (top) -- VS-- gtg.steem.house:8090 (bottom)
In the screencapture above, you can see, how terribly slow the public Steem node can be.
In this case it's not doing anything.
I haven't yet found a better way, than to go through all operations that happened in the last 24 hours on the Steem blockchain. This now takes a few minutes and my report is finished (I have yet to bring it into a nice format, so I can automatically post it)
Since it looked like the script is frozen, I decided to print each operation's timestamp on the screen, while the script goes through them.
It creates a nice matrix movie effect, too. (I should have maybe changed the colors to green on black)
If i had not already voted for witness, I would certainly do it now.
With some witnesses I don't even know, what they are doing ...
But this is certainly a helpful service.
I hope he can keep it up.