> The 1000 entries/14 days cutoff is because of it being a massive pain in the
> tuchus on the database, IIRC? Which slows everything down for everyone.

The friends page is the single hardest thing the servers will do.  One
friends page request has to make literally hundreds of calls to
memcache, to the databases (every single cluster!), and all of the
other services we have.

Allowing everybody to go back ad infinitum is unlikely to happen.
Allowing paid users to go back is more likely to happen.

For the technically curious, the problem with going back is one of
cache availability.  If you are reading stuff in the past few days,
chances are, somebody else has read it too.  That means the data is
already in memcache, or it's already in the database cache.  The
further you go back, the less and less likely it is to be cached.

As soon as you start loading things that are NOT in cache, you start
hurting site performance.  To give you an idea - the LJ codebase is
designed to run when 95-98% of things are cached.  If you have less
than that?  The site falls down.  If you are reading your friends page
at skip=20, you are in that 95% range, your stuff is cached.  If you
are at skip=3040, you're probably fetching data that is not cached at
all.

Which can become a problem.  :)


-- 
Mark Smith / xb95
[email protected]
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