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

[Paul Rubin]

Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at nospam.uci.edu> writes:
> 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.

Well, that depends on what the hardware is.  Does anyone know?

> However, most every post has the option of people commenting on
> it.  Those stats don't count comments, which all require a DB write.

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.

> > Another informative number (about 1/10th as many visitors/day as
> > Slashdot gets).
> 
> Or really, from my above numbers, > 200,000 visitors/day.

That really is pretty impressive, I had no idea LJ was that big.  I
wonder how much bandwidth they're using, what their expenses are, how
many staff they have, how many paying users, etc.
> 
> > 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.

I don't see any of this stuff as being terribly difficult, it's just
work, and I'm not currently involved in operating such a site, so it's
not something that I have a burning desire to work on for free.  There
are times when I've been interested in running such a site, but the
headaches involved in that would probably be even worse than writing
the code.

LJ doesn't really have the right format for a discussion board, but
maybe it could be adapted.