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

[Josiah Carlson]

> OK, "active in some way" can mean read-only users who neer do anything
> that causes any DB updates.  It can also mean someone who posts a
> comment once a month.  Also, that doesn't say how much hardware they
> use.

Hrm...I'll actually check the page.
http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml

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.

However, most every post has the option of people commenting on it. 
Those stats don't count comments, which all require a DB write.  I would 
be willing to bet that the number of replies to posts exceeds the number 
of posts, but replies don't seem to count.

Checking on my own counts, I've posted 553 entries, received 1,110 
comments to my posts, and posted 1,767 replies to other entries.  Now, 
if we assume I'm a lower bound, then for every entry in someone's 
livejournal, there are at least two comments, which means that there 
were an additional ~400,000 database writes that involved comments.


>>30k visitors/day,

> Another informative number (about 1/10th as many visitors/day as
> Slashdot gets).

Or really, from my above numbers, > 200,000 visitors/day.


> OK, I'm not familiar with all LJ features, but so far this doesn't sound
> too bad.

With the new numbers, perhaps you'll change your mind ;).


>>No offense, but I'd love to see you write a BBS/Blogging software that
>>does that - in any language.
> 
> I have some curiosity about how to go about that (hence this thread)
> but at the moment I don't have powerful enough motivation to actually
> want to do the work.

Yeah.  The trick is that most anything that is really intellectually 
stimulating, is difficult to do.  Solving the dynamic-page-generation 
problem can be intellectually stimulating, but it is not easy.  Adding 
into it the page formatting with templates problem, database load, 
bandwidth problem, etc.  It starts getting unweildy very quickly.

  - Josiah