bottlenecks
When you're fretting about a server not having enough capacity — which is the root of the problems DCist is currently facing — you start thinking about bottlenecks. What's the slowest part of the system? That's where you need to direct your efforts, whether it be the connection, database, scripts or external services. Speed up the slowest thing, then hope that's enough. If it isn't, find the next-slowest thing and fix that. Repeat as necessary until you run out of patience or money.
This is the frame of mind I'm currently in. So it was pretty interesting to read this post of Jeff's, in which he discusses a book he's just read about the science of food production. According to the author, if you look at the global ecosystem — the growth and metabolic processing of life on this planet as a coherent whole — it turns out that you can locate the system's bottleneck: it's the rate at which nitrogen can be removed from the air and turned into a form directly usable by life.
We're past that bottleneck now, thanks to our ability to synthesize fertilizer. But Jeff reports that if we gave that up, reintroduced the bottleneck, and simply ran the system at peak efficiency — all organic farming, everywhere, all the time, in other words — a few billion people would have to quickly convert to Breatharianism.
Maybe I'm just in a weird mood, but I find all this pretty interesting. It's tough to see where these bottlenecks exist. In hindsight it's easy to see that advances like agriculture, sanitation, industrial manufacturing and digital technology all allowed rate-limited but otherwise ready systems to suddenly spring forward. Makes you wonder what's holding us back right now.
