OT: why do web BBS's and blogs get so slow?

[Josiah Carlson]

> OK, I looked at a few typical user pages.  I might look at the code
> sometime (I think it's in Perl though, yecch).  But I don't understand
> about needing to do a lot of processing for each page.  The ones I
> looked at looked like they could have been served static entirely from
> cache, updated only when someone actually posts a new entry or comment.
> Maybe it's doing that, which would certainly make it fast.

Quoting the latest news post (http://www.livejournal.com/users/news/)
"We now host over 2,000,000 users, roughly half of which are active in 
some way."

'Active in some way' are those who visit and check their friends page, 
those that post updates to their own livejournal, or those that post 
replies to entries/replies on livejournals, I believe in the last month.

30k visitors/day, many doing more than one thing when they visit (check 
their friends page, post some replies, update their own livejournal, 
etc.), everyone hitting different parts of the database, many causing 
database updates (without updates, livejournal is worthless), etc.

No offense, but I'd love to see you write a BBS/Blogging software that 
does that - in any language.

  - Josiah