Slashdot Mirror
A High-School Hacker's Notebook
An anonymous reader writes: "Remember those high-school lunchtimes, back in the day, when you and your computer-nerd friends would hang out by the Krunch Korral, discussing that cool computer game that you were all going to write? And one guy did the music, and one guy made the levels, and you wrote it all down in a notebook? Well, just in case you lost it, here's that notebook."
This code would be VERY simple to write.
It sounds like you're assuming the problem is technical. I think it is not. Judging by Rob Malda's comments surrounding the subscription thing, Slashdot's largest expense is the bandwidth. Serving up cached articles could easily increase their bandwidth consumption several times over. (Rob says very few people read comments. So instead of loading one front page, the readers now load one front page plus four cached articles. Bandwidth consumption has just pentupled!)
The other issue here, obviously, is copyright infringement. Sure, you and I know that it's benign, even helpful to the site creator, but not everyone is going to see it that way. I can't imagine the slashdot editors want to deal with the legal headaches that could arise here.
I have an idea, though... maybe Google would be willing to set up a "streamlined" URL submission page for "trusted" submitters - I bet quite a few Google employees read slashdot. It would allow the trusted users to submit URL's that would be immediately cached and indexed, instead of the usual several week lag time. Google can afford the bandwidth, and their cache is already a generally accepted part of the net landscape. Of course, this doesn't help with image-intensive pages, but those stories are usually lame anyway (woahhhh, dude, check out that case mod! it's got a big hole chopped in the side and it's filled with strawberry Jell-O.)
klik'n'create (and its little brother klik'n'play) grew up to become The Games Factory (very similar to KnP). There's a new nifty-looking 3D one from the same people called Jamagic, which abandons KnP/TGFs "point and drool" pseudo-programming in favour of javascript [pseudo-programming]. Jamagic and TGF are available from clickteam.com
The reason why sites are brought down because of the slashdot effect is probably a combination of two things: (1) large pictures on the web page (like in this case) and (2) lots of server side scripting. In the former case the server bandwidth is the bottleneck, whereas in the latter case the server runs out of CPU cycles and RAM.
I have been slashdotted twice myself (Streaming RealAudio From a Commodore 64 and VNC Server for Toasters and Light-Switches). In both cases the web server running on the Commodore 64 was really slow because of the load, whereas the "regular" web server hosting the description pages behaved differently in the two cases. The first time there were a number of pictures on the linked page, and the web server was sluggish because of the load. The other time the web page only consisted of a single HTML text page with a single picture and the load on the web server was hardly noticeable.
The web server on the first occation was a dual CPU PC with 2 GB RAM and for the second occation the server was a single CPU PC with 256 MB RAM. The first web server also hosts some hundred domains, whereas the second only hosts one. The Commodore 64 has 64kB RAM and runs at 1 MHz, but only hosted one domain.
To sum up: a web server running on a Commodore 64 is a little too slow to be able to deliver pages in full speed during a slashdotting, whereas a PC can handle it, given that the web page consists mostly of text and doesn't have too many heavy scripts.