Split Up Comments/Send to Next Page

[QuirkyJessi]

I opened a link to a post the other day and was shocked how long it was taking to load. Both my computer and my net connection are fast, so most things instantly load, but this page was taking way too long and nothing appeared to be out of place. I could see all the ads, the banner, the post, etc, but when I tried to scroll, I realized it wasn't done loading.

Because there were over 2500 comments.

And they were all showing at the bottom of the main post, causing the page to be a trillion pages long (maybe a slight exaggeration) and take forever to load, even though it was just text. For being that well-off, I'm shocked that they didn't have the comments split so that you could click a "view next comments" or "view page 700 of comments" link.

Personally, I don't get enough comments to even consider splitting them, but for those of you who do, do you leave them all together or do you have it set up to send some to the next page? What are your thoughts on blogs that have it set one way or another?

[Skolor]

If its taking that long to load, it would be in the blogger's best interest to break them up.

With something like that, it sounds like the reason it took so long to load is because their database was getting hit so hard. A lot of comments means a lot of files have to get pulled out of the database. It wouldn't matter where you're getting it from, the server is just taking too long to generate the page.

I can't imagine a reason not to. No one is going to read all those comments, why load them all and put all that strain on your server?