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

[Lothar Scholz]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote in message news:<7xbrojk9rk.fsf_-_ at ruckus.brouhaha.com>...
> Lots of times, when a blog (that supports user comments) or a web BBS
> gets heavily loaded, it slows down horribly, even when it's hosted at
> an ISP on a fast computer with plenty of net bandwidth.  I'm wondering
> what those programs are doing, that makes them bog down so badly.
> Anyone know what the main bottlenecks are?  I'm just imagining them
> doing a bunch of really dumb things.

The problem is that most of them don't use an application server and
that most of them uses databases very unoptimized, for example PhpBB
runs about 50 SQL queries per page for medium size thread views.

The www.asp-shareware.org has a nice framework that let you view the
messages in an nntp server. It's amazing fast, because everything is
hold in memory. Optimizing this by a factor 10 is not difficult.

The problem may come with slashdot or for example the german website
"www.heise.de" which gets upto 100 requests per second (it's among the
top ten in germany). They also use a NNTP backend. For sites like this
you need multiple server and then its not so easy to maintain cache
coherence. But there are only very few websites that have this
traffic.

At the moment there seems to be absolute no evolution in the area of
BBS's. PHPBB has set a standart an it seems that nobody is able to
think about more/other functionality. Maybe if more and more people
get virtual servers and have more control over what they can install
then it may become better. We shall see.