(no subject)

Deleting users who do not user their journals does not assist the LiveJournal servers in anyway. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, LiveJournal is not short on disk space. The issue, instead, is database access: How many times does LiveJournal have to read values in and out? The in is the harder part of this, as it takes longer to write data than read it. Additionally, there are already limits to quietly prevent your friends page from updating more often than a specified interval. This saves on the "read" side as well. These posting limits will just make the databases faster, because there will be less need to always be writing due to fewer entries. Additionally, deleting/purging users causes other problems. Tables in mySQL become fragmented when data is removed from them, making them slower and more difficult to read data from. Cleaning up after these processes often slows down LiveJournal for several days after a purging run. Additionally, running a "delete" command on databases is slow: these types of actions used to be run during off-peak times on the site, however, there are no longer any off-peak times, as I'm pretty sure any user of LiveJournal is quickly learning. Lastly, these deleted values leave fragmentned disk drives, making the data harder to access and read. This makes access to data slower again, and does not assist with improving the speed of the site.

(no subject)

For those of you (xb95) that are constant watchers of the webcam: http://status.uiuc.edu has updates of the current status of my internet connection. As well noticed, at 9:45 last night, all external connectivity to campus was cut. Sorry about getting kicked out of IRC, sorry about the webcam being off. It's harder for me, I can't get anywhere on the net right now, execpt locally. By the time you see this, I will, of course, be back. but until that time, I sit here, abondoned from the world of cyber-reality, doing my homework for once :)

You know things are bad when you can't even use lynx on a campus machine (telnet to students or use SSH to connect to an ews machine) to get to the outside world.

I feel very isolated indeed right now.

At least I've got newsgroups!

UIUCnet- External network connections down

UIUCnet sucks.