Yes, that was most of my point. Not an OpenACS vs slash or pg vs mysql post, but mainly that at first glance, /. appears to be a site with only moderate demands. As I said, I suspect the vast majority of the db accesses are reads, not writes, and I doubt they accumulate four new posts each second. To me, that's a problem domain that should be reasonably well solved with cacheing.
I come not to bury slashdot, but to praise slashdot and learn from slashdot -- I am confident they have better sysadmins and engineers than I, but I am curious what takes this first glance "moderate demand" site and turns it into a site that requires all the hardware that they have thrown at it, and a site that appears firmly mired in one nines reliability :(.
Is it really just that MySQL sucks harder than the vacuum 150 miles above us all? Does it seem reasonable that a site needs that much hardware for a "mere" 100 requests per second? What else is going on? Is it Apache? Wrong hardware choices? If my assumptions are wrong, that's cool too. Tell me where I am off, and I can learn something more about web development.
