How does 4chan work? Is the number assigned to each comment just

>>55499394
Since the beginning of the board.

>>55499394
>>>/g/sqt

>>55499394
>How does 4chan work?
It's powered on anger and meems
> Is the number assigned to each comment just a tally of how many posts
it's the tally of memes posted since the beggininging of tiem

No. It is a number that, when divided by itself, creates the upper bound for the set of numbers that represent the number of minutes OP has been on this site.

>>55501086
this is the right answer OP >>55499394

>>55499422
Database schema: each board has a table, and the post number is the auto-incrementing primary key. It's that simple.

Textboard and imageboard software is surprisingly straightforward and usually just regenerates static HTML pages when someone makes a post. That keeps the server load down for the people who are just browsing the board before they post (most of them) - the big drain there is thumbnailing, any filtering you're doing, and anything you have to do for your anti-spam needs (since a spammer doesn't even need to sign up an account, this is significant unless you want your board to be full of pizza once one of the chan aggregator sites finds it).

Cache management is very important to keep bandwidth down, but the big drain there is the image hosting - long TTL, totally static, but big files.

This chan software can do regular refreshes via Javascript to update pages. I modified Tinyboard when I ran mine to use Websockets - still quite new at the time - as a pub/sub channel, individually broadcasting each post in a JSON API (this predated 4chan's JSON API and unfortunately used a slightly different format) to everyone on the thread it was made on, in which the Javascript dynamically live-updated the page in a few tens of ms. Knocked something up in node.js: it worked. Scaled O(n^2), but so do refreshes. Also had a mod page in which every post on every board was visible in a live scrolling list, so a mod could have that tab open and monitor the whole shebang when active. My fork diverged a bit from Michael's, and was mostly superseded by doing it the old 4chan refresh way in the main fork, and when I handed the chan I ran over to someone else they switched board software because they weren't very technical and found what I was doing to be too complicated.