I noticed that the timestamps, i.e. the piece of data that determines "when" for each point on the graph, are measured in seconds. This seems highly inefficient considering the fact that the GE only updates about once a day. I don't know how the databases are set up, but I hope you're not using using a new timestamp for each item to log its price each day (i.e., a different entry of the same timestamp for every item each day). Currently, the timestamps are 10 digits long. This might not sound like much, but if you have 40000 (number based off google trends) people each accessing 250 data points (easily achievable by just checking a few items or longer timespans) each day, that adds up to about 100mb/day (3gb/month) of timestamps alone. I'll leave how (and if) you optimize is up to you (i.e., the staff). I just thought I'd bring it to your attention. :P I know some of you will probably wonder how/why I would have figured this out, so I'll just satisfy your curiosity by explaining it now... Earlier today I had my firewall's network monitor window (shows URLs extracted from raw traffic in real time) open on one monitor, and Tip.it's GEC on the other. When I loaded an item, being a fairly technically oriented person, I noticed it was loading the information into the swf through the parameters of a php script. There's nothing interesting about that (it's what I expected to see), but when I changed the timescale, I saw a new parameter added. There's nothing especially interesting about that either, except that the value given for it seemed too large to be relative to time. Interested and confused, I gathered a few more data points to compare them and try to figure out what they meant. The first thing I noticed was that they were increasing pretty linearly, but the difference between two data points still seemed too large to be a unit of time measurement in decimal numbers. After running out of ideas of what else it could be, I jokingly divided the difference of two data points ("8 months ago" and "9 months ago") by 86400 (the conversion of seconds to to days) and was astonished when it was just about 30.
