use Perl

• Slashdot is still the two-ton gorilla (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  I’ve seen people post in two or three different occasions when they got linkslammed by multiple sites, and they all said that visitors coming from Slashdot were by far the bulk of the traffic, with a much larger initial spike and a much longer overall wave. The biggest reason is probably that stories stay on the Slashdot homepage much longer than links fall off the bottom of the Digg homepage.
  • Re:Slashdot is still the two-ton gorilla (Score:2)

    by Purdy (2383)

    I've seen that analysis, too, and I agree. I did overstep and say that Slashdot was toppled, when it's not really.
    
    What I'd really like to emphasize more is that since I've known, read and followed Slashdot (5 years?), it is only recently that it has made steps to improve itself and it seems to be a reaction to the gaining popularity of Digg.
    
    My bad [perl.org]. ;)
    
    - Jason
    • Re:Slashdot is still the two-ton gorilla (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      I don’t know if it’s competition in that exact sense.

      What I see is more that Slashdot was up to par with the status quo until recently. Noone at Slashdot had specific incentive to improve upon the interface. Then the AJAX wave broke out, and people started to think about how to use that for a community site – and these people do have incentive to improve upon Slashdot. So basically they’re doing R&D for Slashdot. Anything they come up with, Slashdot will eventually catch up to.
      • Re:Slashdot is still the two-ton gorilla (Score:2)

        by pudge (1)

        The thing is, we have made many improvements in Slashdot over the years, but in the last several years, most of them are more under the hood. There is some truth about other sites doing R&D for us, but it is mostly because we are so big, we can less afford to do client-side improvements than alienate a large number of users. Even the things we are doing now may not work with IE6, but should work with IE7. We've wanted to do JavaScript and CSS on comments for a long time, but really, the time is just
• AJAX isn't always a drain on the server (Score:1)

  by mpeters (5802)

  Not that I'm an AJAX fanatic, but I think AJAX get's a bad rap for being a drain on server resources. If used right it can actually reduce bandwidth and lessen the work of the server.

  First off, page requests can be smaller since the whole thing doesn't have to be sent on each request. Secondly, common functionality that would otherwise take cycles to compute (navigation bars, etc) on each request don't need to be if that part of the page doesn't change. And if the application caches properly on the clie
  • Re:AJAX isn't always a drain on the server (Score:2)

    by pudge (1)

    Right now, Slashdot uses Ajax for comments in only one place: to load long comments. So we give you only a portion of the comment, and then you click "Read the Rest of this Comment" to get the rest. We will also do Ajax for, probably, moderation and replying, but that obviously won't increase server use in any way, since you now have to load whole pages to do the same thing.
• been wondering the same thing (Score:1)

  by tf23 (1197)

  First off, there's webstats. Every advertiser, or potential one, wants to know the page views count, and wants that broken down by demographics/location.
  
  If the user's able to get all the information in one hit because the page is loaded with a bunch of tools setup to use ajax, isn't this almost counter productive?
  
  I think someone else had already mentioned that with proper caching ajax hits (or the multitude thereof) can be handled. Gotta love memcached :)