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

[Josiah Carlson]

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

If you check their stats page (that I linked):
http://livejournal.com/stats

They have ~80,000 paid members.  Even when buying in a yearly package, 
that's around $2/month, which puts them at around $160k/month in 
revenue, not including those that pay the additional ~$1/month for extra 
livejournal icons.

> 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.

This was discussed some months ago on the news journal:
http://livejournal.com/users/news

If you are interested, read up.

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

I agree.

  - Josiah