This sounds interesting but you're using a lot of jargon, could expand on it? I know the thundering herd problem is when a resource goes away and then everybod

This sounds interesting but you're using a lot of jargon, could expand on it? I know the thundering herd problem is when a resource goes away and then everybody tries to fetch it the moment it comes back up, sending it down again. What is the subscription update model you're referring to, and to what portion of the system does it apply? I was under the impression that user stream updates were distributed somewhat asynchronously, and were heavily cached, but I could be wrong. I was unaware of BigPipe, but a good explanation is here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p... However, I don't understand what you mean by a streaming model as it applies to web page generation.