Concurrent:Active Request Limit (or how I finally learned to know what my system was saying)

The other day I saw a few jobs queuing in the Conflict Resolution Manager, and investigating I saw the following message:

This request is pending because the profile option 'Concurrent:Active Request Limit' is set.
This profile option controls how many requests a given user may have running at one time.

User X submitted this request on 09-AUG-2012 08:00:00.
The Conflict Resolution Manager will release this request when the number of running requests for this user is less than the maximum allowed by the profile option.

Now I’d seen this quite a few times but I always thought it was a bug and the CRM thought we couldn’t let anything run, since I interrepted it as being set at a user level, yet today when I looked at the message I wondered if we had it set at a site level and sure enough we did.  It is entirely possible that with the old server hardware we were on a few years ago there was a reason this was setup but since it doesn't even look like we're hitting this limit I don’t think we need it set in our environment today since requests appear to be slowed down by this.