I've been studying performance today. I'm looking for the
bottlenecks. The total volume of traffic on the site is not so high
as to cause me to reasonably suspect that hardware is the problem. So
I'm looking for things that people do on the site that tend to be
expensive, so that we can eliminate features for awhile (if we must)
or find ways to optimize/cache them.
1. I notice that many of the 'special' pages are quite popular. I
suspect that these are our best bets.
2. I propose that we test the site without the "this page has been
accessed N times" feature. Doesn't it seem excessive to have a
database write for every single pageview, when we are trying to
increase performance? A nearly equivalent feature could be provided
with a daily update from the access logs.
--Jimbo