Grim... wrote:
Mr Dom wrote:
If they had an announcement that was going to be popular, they could always make a site that didn't use ~1MB of images & associated gumph per page...
Maybe a static page & a couple of well compressed images, keep it under 50k & watch your server cope with 10x the visitors easily. But they never think like that do they...
You're assuming that they bottlenecked on disk I/O and had ten times the capacity everywhere else, though.
Most of it would be served straight from memory - server wouldn't bother reading the disk for every access, and I would hope the server had >1MB free
Bandwidth would be my guess at their limit, and once it starts chugging, then people start hammering the refresh or opening the page multiple times, and the load leaps up yet again and it all turns to poo...
It really is not an optimised site - to many artists, not enough techies, and I think it often comes down to thinking that problems like these can be bought away with enough cash for better servers - probably costing far more in the long run than having a good web programmer audit & optimise the site in the first place. My dad did 'proper computing' for many years, and was always trying to explain to me that at the corporate level, hardware is cheap, software is expensive (programming, licensing, & maintenance), and optimisation is often ignored in favor of buying faster kit.
The inefficiency of it all winds me up something chronic