And no -- the problem is basically, in order to build the reading page (or the LJ friends page, this applies for both sites), you have to load up all the posts from all the people, then slice and dice them (in what order should they appear? do you have permission to see this post? etc, etc, etc) to create the final list that gets displayed on the friends/reading page. It's a very database-intensive operation, no matter how much you optimize the heck out of it, so the more people who are on the friends/reading page, the more intensive it is. It's not so much getting the posts that's the problem, it's the loading them into memory, checking the security of each one, etc.
no subject
And no -- the problem is basically, in order to build the reading page (or the LJ friends page, this applies for both sites), you have to load up all the posts from all the people, then slice and dice them (in what order should they appear? do you have permission to see this post? etc, etc, etc) to create the final list that gets displayed on the friends/reading page. It's a very database-intensive operation, no matter how much you optimize the heck out of it, so the more people who are on the friends/reading page, the more intensive it is. It's not so much getting the posts that's the problem, it's the loading them into memory, checking the security of each one, etc.