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

[Jay O'Connor]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> 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.
> 
> I'm asking this on clpy because thinking about the problem naturally
> made me wonder how I'd write a program like that myself, which of
> course would mean using Python.
> 
> FWIW, here's how I'd do it:
> 
> 1) It would be single threaded web server (asyncore, twistedmatrix)
> with a select loop talking to a socket, either on port 80 directly, or
> to a proxy web server running mod_gzip, SSL, and so forth.


> 2) It might use MySQL for infrequent operations like user info lookup
> at login time or preference updates, but not for frequent operations
> like reading and posting messages.  User session info and preferences
> would be in ram during a session, in a python dict indexed by a
> browser session cookie.


This is similar to what I wrote in Smalltalk several years and is now running 
http://www.ezboard.com