New patch = New bugs
All those restarts yesterday = me doing my best to diagnose and improve the issue which we did hence why the server is now capable of lasting 2 hours rather than 45 minutes before reaching the state its in for you now.
Devs are already aware of it and have been since yesterday. It's impossible for them to test new patches for performance at high player counts without releasing them first. It's even harder for them to ensure it works on hardware which is less than ideal like ours.
I'll be switching the server to 2 hourly restarts to improve the problem tonight. Please have patience and understand that I'm aware of these problems and working on them before you even notice them in game yourselves. Blood trails are planned to be turned off later when more servers are up. For now I want to let new players checking out 1.8.1 see them.