Haha, “dialup modem speed” really brings back memories of the old internet days! Have you tried checking your server’s network connection or the mirror it’s pulling the updates from? Sometimes switching to a different repository mirror can speed things up.
I can’t imagine our server is ever under that kind of load (and I didn’t see slowness on any more my servers when updating). It’s just serving static files, and Apache can serve a brazillion requests per second when serving static files on modern hardware. So…gotta be something else, but I don’t know what.