Question about Live Journal to software engineers

[anhinga_anhinga]

Is there any good reason to restrict the availability of the Friends page by the most recent two weeks?

Does this restriction really help LJ to scale?

Comments

[avva.livejournal.com]

Back when I worked on LJ source, when you were paging the Friends page backwards, the code still had to construct the entire list of posts from the most recent one, and then cut from it the window you were interested in. So if you wanted to see entries 151-200, it'd calculate the list of entries 1-200, then take the last 50. As the number grew, such a request would stress the databases more and more. The two weeks restriction was placed to put a limit to that.

I stopped looking at the site source circa 2005, so things may have changed since then, but back then the limit was more or less dictated by the realities of scale at the time.

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

Thanks!