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I guess I'm just curious on the technical side, about why they go into a temporary read-only mode. What issues forced that to be implemented?

I am mostly wondering whether it's the threaded nature of a thread on Reddit that makes this a difficult problem, or whether this is reflective of some limitation in the underlying datastore or something.

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It's because a the database isn't completely agnosticly load-balanced, and a single story is stored/processed with more co-locality than a random sample of, say, 10000 randomly chosen comments.

It's easier to cache and serve a fixed piece of content than to constantly insert and re-compress it (which kills cached versions too)

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