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

[Paul Rubin]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
> >But LiveJournal is another one of those sites that slows to a crawl
> >when loaded.  I want to know how the FAST sites do it.
> 
> Considering just how loaded it needs to be before slowing down, and
> considering how much processing LJ needs to do to display each page, I'd
> have to say that it's pretty damn fast and you can probably learn a lot
> from its design.

OK, I looked at a few typical user pages.  I might look at the code
sometime (I think it's in Perl though, yecch).  But I don't understand
about needing to do a lot of processing for each page.  The ones I
looked at looked like they could have been served static entirely from
cache, updated only when someone actually posts a new entry or comment.
Maybe it's doing that, which would certainly make it fast.