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."
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.