The AMA made the DB scream 
![cpus](https://snimgs.s3.amazonaws.com/cpus.png)
The left axis is CPU "demand". The dotted line is the number of CPUs we actually have - 2. The blue in each bar are queries for the front page. The yellow is counting the comments for each item on the front page.

k00b

247bf84fda

Plan for speeding up the site which I should be able to do before Miami:

Daily discussion thread

saloon

Plan for speeding up the site which I should be able to do before Miami:

1. bigger DB instance
2. if I can't further optimize queries, denormalize some of the data in the DB ... right now two aggregate queries dominate the CPU of the DB: the front page query for items (most of the time is spent counting all votes for items) and counting comments for items ... I hate denormalizing data but it'll work