You should consider using some of those "secrets" on your own site. :)
Kinda ironic, huh? I made the decision to leave all that dirty work to Posterous, with whom I've been very happy. Every once in a while it gets sluggish. Perhaps one of them will read this and speed it up when no one's looking.
I've heard good things about them too. Probably just some broken widget between my desk in Sydney and their servers somewhere in North America.
I'm kind of interested in the way many of those large-scale sites have to prioritise availability over response time due to their architecture. At least, that seems to be the way services like GAE work. They guarantee uptime, but latency for things like database queries tends to be fixed and not that fast.
Kinda ironic, huh? I made the decision to leave all that dirty work to Posterous, with whom I've been very happy. Every once in a while it gets sluggish. Perhaps one of them will read this and speed it up when no one's looking.