My motivation in developing Standalone Comment and Trackback Servers for Radio Userland was to improve my weblog performance and to minimize my external dependencies. Radio Userland renders static html pages and has very good server performance with three exceptions: the comment count, the trackback count, and the statistics web bug.

When your Radio Userland weblog is slow, the culprit is usually the comment and/or trackback counters. The static page is quickly delivered, but page rendering has to wait for the counter javascript from the comment and trackback servers. Switching to standalone servers can provide a more consistent response and eliminate long delays. The statistics web bug can also be slow, but your browser can render the page while it’s waiting on the web bug.