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

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> >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.

I think of "DB write" as something different than just appending
something to a file, i.e. a DB write means SQL parsing, transactional

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

That sounds that they can deal with scaling issues by just throwing
more hardware at the problem.  Especially since I think their
high-traffic pages (like the home page) are static.  The dynamic pages
are user journals which I think don't interact with each other that
much and which (unlike Slashdot's comment threads) don't individually
get very heavy traffic.  They could basically have completely separate
servers for usernames beginning with "a", "b", "c", etc. and have a
simple load balancer redirecting browser requests.

> 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.

Yeah, but I don't know if I could stomach looking at that much Perl code.