OT: why are LAMP sites slow?

[Leif K-Brooks]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> I notice that lots of the medium-largish sites (from hobbyist BBS's to
> sites like Slashdot, Wikipedia, etc.)  built using this approach are
> painfully slow even using seriously powerful server hardware.  Yet
> compared to a really large site like Ebay or Hotmail (to say nothing
> of Google), the traffic levels on those sites is just chickenfeed.

To some extent, I would say it has to do with the servers being used. 
Slashdot has only 10 servers [1], while Wikipedia has only 39 [2]; 
Hotmail, on the other hand, has around 3500 [3].

A better comparison to Hotmail is the high-traffic Web site Neopets, 
which has around 200 servers [4] and uses Linux, Oracle, MySQL (for a 
few parts of the site), Apache, and PHP.

[1] <http://slashdot.org/faq/tech.shtml#te050>
[2] <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers>
[3] <http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html#_Toc491601826>
[4] Estimated by counting the name of wwwXXX.neopets.com domain names 
(238). Neopets probably has at least 300 servers if you include non-Web 
servers.