I’ve heard of this concept multiple times throughout my time on the internet, but I never understood what causes a “server load”. Now that I’m in one of the biggest instances on Lemmy, this is one of the significant issues that we face. So what is a “server load”, why does it slow down websites instead of stopping them? Does the load on a server increase by the amount of information in it, the browsing of information, or both? Does upvoting and downvoting cause a load too? Does saving posts and comments to your profile also cause a server load?
Many apps work on a “client-server” model, where you (via a website or an app, the client) ask for things from some other machine on the internet - the server. These things the client asks for could be to get some information about something, or to make some sorta change to something
In general, these “things” the client asks for are called “requests”, and Server Load is a sorta measure of how much effort the server needs to spend to handle these requests
Different requests could have different levels of effort, and even different types of effort (ex. A file upload would depend on how fast the storage is. Complex calculations like trying to find the fastest route on a map would depend on how fast the processor is). In general though, the more requests per second that you have to deal with, the more load it puts on the server