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

[Paul Rubin]

Max M <maxm at mxm.dk> writes:
> But the biggest problem is without a doubt a lack of caching.
> 
> A subproblem here is that the sites are designed without caching
> considderations in mind.
> 
> A Pentium 133 can easily fill up a 10Mbit line. That is a lot of requests.
> 
> So if you have a system that can generate static pages, that Apache
> can serve you can have really fast systems.

I'd like to think that a well designed system can serve dynamic pages
almost as fast as static ones.  If the page says "Hi <username>" at
the top, all it really needs to be doing is concatenating a few
in-memory strings together before serving the page.

The one way where static might win is if mod_gzip is a big cpu load.
You could cache pages in compressed form.  However, even that may not
matter much.  I believe gzip format lets you concatenate compressed 
strings or files together, and still have them uncompress properly.