I'm also trying to come up with some method of "caching" the friends page requests so that, if nothing has updated since the last time, the user would cause nothing more than a quick "anything new?" check on the main db and if nothing is new, get the results off a separate db. (which I'm not sure whether should be flat desk, another mysql db on another server or maybe even on the same... no idea as of yet what would work out well) What kind of space are y'all working with? (free disk space mostly) Granted, I haven't had time to really think this through so it might be a really bad idea
All in all, what are the worst bottlenecks right now? Database traffic? Web server traffic? Ninja's attacking the servers? =)
I was also aiming to write a small, quick image front end that would basically figure out which image to pick instead of just going directly to it. In other words, lets say you have image files for 0 - 40 posts, which of course would grab image0, image1, image2,.... image40, after 40 you get a broken link currently. The front end would instead get you an "out of range" (maybe imageoor) one. The script would obviously need to be run on img.livejournal.com so it would be able to know how many images there are. Does this sound like something that would be useful in y'all's eyes?
Enough babble. This is my way of saying hi folk. ;)