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

[Aahz]

In article <7xvfmp7tpn.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
Paul Rubin  <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
>Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at nospam.uci.edu> writes:
>>
>> As of right now, says that > 217,000 users have updated their
>> livejournal in the last 24 hours.  That is 217,000 database writes in
>> the last 24 hours.  Nothing to shake a stick at.
>
>Well, that depends on what the hardware is.  Does anyone know?

Go look at their site!  ;-)

>> However, most every post has the option of people commenting on
>> it.  Those stats don't count comments, which all require a DB write.
>
>Have you looked at the code and confirmed that each comment post
>requires a DB write in the usual sense?  Part of this discussion has
>been about how to avoid DB writes for such common operations.

They require writes at *some* point, because they're persistent.  What
kind of system they use (if any) to batch things up for efficiency, I've
no idea.

>> Or really, from my above numbers, > 200,000 visitors/day.
>
>That really is pretty impressive, I had no idea LJ was that big.  I
>wonder how much bandwidth they're using, what their expenses are, how
>many staff they have, how many paying users, etc.

LJ is huge.  I'd guess probably >50% of their active userbase is paying.

>LJ doesn't really have the right format for a discussion board, [...]

Which is precisely why I said that I was loathe to mention it.  ;-)
(I'm well-known in my social circle for my antipathy to LJ.)

Nevertheless, LJ is an excellent example of a high-performance web
application where the software is available as Open Source.  You can
probably learn a lot if you dig into it.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- 
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."  --GvR