However the hardware sponsors would be the first target for anyone wanting to use the courts to silence opposition websites. Just as they have tried with Media7 (read the link)

It isn’t purely a technical issue.

Anyway, I think you have the wrong name – should be Noddy. Ummm now it is…….. everywhere through the site. Generally it does pay to annoy a tired sysop

The problem in this site is that we get a hell of a lot of comments on a lot of posts. Therefore a lot of page views by both readers coming in from the searches and by the various search bugs.

The front page isn’t too much of a hassle despite the updates from comment counts. It gets the majority of views, but caches reasonably easily. The speed that comments are added isn’t a real hassle.

The pages getting commented on was why I put a time limit of about a month on leaving comments on the posts at the end of last year. That immediately reduced the load because those could be reported to the search engines as essentially being static.

However the search engines are all over any page that has comments being updated. I think that googlebot is the most assidous readers of this site. There are a proliferating number of bot’s. They kind of provide a background noise for the whole site (but we ignore them for reporting) which is why our page views are down compared to some sites. We encourage it by having a sitemap plugin that actively tells a number of search engines about what areas are ‘hot’.

However I think I’ll have to start discouraging anyone who isn’t a major SE.

Then of course there are the RSS and Feedcatchers, etc. They are restricted to the last 15 posts..

Anyway, the point is that the actual commentators aren’t actually the real issue. It all those observing them….

Boots the traffic up pretty damn high as a base load. Looks to me like we’re going to have to look at some kind of dedicated systems shortly. That means it will move from the kind of penny-pinching that we’ve run it on to date.

I wasn’t raising it as a user bug as such, just thought it might be a (small) waste of your data and/or cpu cycles.

IrishBill: And that’s you on your first warning. Troll again and I’ll ban you for as long as I feel is suitable.

Sounds like you need to keep searching for another host though.

I hate coding nightmares like that though – I really felt for you reading through it all. Our comments feed died just over a months ago and I have gone around in circles trying to solve the issue staying awake for hours and wasting time trying to get answers out of Blogger. I have now officially given up and we are going to be migrating ourselves to a hosted WordPress platform as a result – thankfully we have been donated free hosting so we shouldn’t have your issues.

I’m glad you’re away from them, and wish you trouble-free hosting!

However generating pages is a big exercise on a site that keeps having comments and posts added.

Was hanging on the blackberry and on desktop +firefox, now almost back to normal.