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

[Aahz]

In article <7x4qu9s319.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,
Paul Rubin  <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
>aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) writes:
>> 
>> They require writes at *some* point, because they're persistent.  What
>> kind of system they use (if any) to batch things up for efficiency, I've
>> no idea.
>
>I think of "DB write" as something different than just appending
>something to a file, i.e. a DB write means SQL parsing, transactional

Dunno.

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

That's certainly possible.  I believe that some community journals get
heavy traffic, though.

>> Nevertheless, LJ is an excellent example of a high-performance web
>> application where the software is available as Open Source.  You can
>> probably learn a lot if you dig into it.
>
>Yeah, but I don't know if I could stomach looking at that much Perl code.

Repeat my earlier comment with extra emphasis.  ;-)  ("I'm loathe...")
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable
classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code -- 
not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death."  --GvR