Inactive Users, and the strain they put on LJ's resources

[azurelunatic]

This is a periodic rant, inspired by suggestions today. Expanded from the source:

There seems to be a wide-spread misconception that inactive accounts are some sort of strain on LJ's resources. They are not. Yes, they are taking up namespace, and they are taking up some storage space, but it is not the great hindrance on LJ's performance that people tend to think it is.

If an account hasn't been touched for a while, it is moved to the "inactive" cluster, to get it out of the way of active journals in the database, but it was still accessible and easy (invisibly easy) to re-activate if the user ever decided to return to the journal.

Active users who are using LJ are posting new entries, refreshing their friends page, leaving comments, and loading images. They're not just sitting there and quietly gathering dust on what's probably less than a gig worth of text. Storage these days, in amounts that the average person buys, is around $1/gig -- you can get a 200-gig hard drive for around $200.

The maximum entry size is 64k. That's not much when you're talking about image sizes, but that's a considerable amount of text. One of my friends has the collected works of Shakespeare in a file that's around 150 megabytes. In order for someone to have 1 gigabyte of storage used up by entries, they'd have to have 16,300-odd entries at the maximum entry size. Userpics and styles and assorted database overhead (entry titles, moods, music, etc.) would account for some more, but text really isn't that large to store. (I have 21,000-odd entries, accumulated over nearly six years now. I'm one of the edge cases. I still probably have under a gig of text stored, given that most of the entries wouldn't have hit 64k.)

Thinking about the $1/gig price range, and the fact that most users would have accounts under a gig, two virtual gifts would more than cover LJ's storage cost for each inactive user.

Comments

[hotarunokokoro.livejournal.com]

You always make so much sense! Thanks for you observations and how easily you make them understood!
^_^

[azurelunatic]

I'm glad to be of help.

[http://users.livejournal.com/chas_/]

A question that comes to my mind is, in a social environment, why isn't namespace considered a resource? In a social environment your moniker is typically extremely personal and more valuable than storage to you.

Also, storage cost is more than just the base cost of the drive(I won't even go into how LJ probably isn't using the el cheapo drives we can get). You also need to include the cost of keeping said drives online and in running servers. Then there's the cost of maintaining those servers and powering them, etc, etc, etc. I'm willing to bet that that raises the price considerably beyond $1/user. Basically, if inactive accounts were purged at regular intervals, the whole cost of maintaining a backup system for them to be kept on could be dumped instead into helping the active users.

After all, inactive users are just an overhead that is going to continue to balloon. It is a resource black hole that is going to get hungrier and hungrier as time goes on. Better to nip that in the bud, if you ask me.

[azurelunatic]

Those are good points.

[fatmuttony.livejournal.com]

Brilliant explanation. So, one shouldn't go around deleting their journals simply because they feel guilty of hogging space, right?

[azurelunatic]

That's the gist of it. Guilty about hogging names, perhaps that might be a reason -- but anyone wanting the name of a deleted journal would have to a) wait for LJ to go through one of the periodic database purges, and b) pay $15 for a rename token to use in order to claim that name.

[fatmuttony.livejournal.com]

Thanks! You should write a book called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About LJ But Were Afraid to Ask (http://imdb.com/title/tt0068555/).

:D

[azurelunatic]

Hee. I think that would probably wind up falling to one of the admins, because they know more about LJ, and some of them even write better than I do.