Slashdot Mirror
Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"?
mattsucks asks: "I was surfing Google News today, looking for something interesting. I had just loaded the page, and hit refresh. A new story popped up at the top of the news page, so I chased the link. 'Server Too Busy, Try Again Later' replied the kind webserver. Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended). Another example: one of our local talk-radio DJs likes to have his listeners pound the web sites of anyone he is peeved at. He's the #1 DJ in his slot, so when he says 'click' he generates a LOT of traffic. What other causes have people found of the Slashdot Effect?"
If a spammer is foolish enough to host locally and advertise a URL, that's a good way to get yourself slashdotted - assuming people still bombard spamvertised websites with null requests.
This sig no verb.
I run a site that has a lot of technical jiggery-pokery that people seem to like.
/. effect, as I've seen slashdotted sites who've received less.
About once a month or so, my daily hitrate goes up from around 10,000 per day to around 100,000*, as some foreign site discovers the site.
It's only ever foreign sites, too - no English-language sites seem to generate that amount of hits. I suppose I have no way of knowing if I'm the butt of a thousand jokes on the sites that link me.
Anyway, my point is that if you're looking for sources of the slashdot effect, don't forget to include foreign sites, as it's likely that foreign countries could conceivably have 'national portals', or whatever.
* I presume this fits within the bounds of the
Britain's well-known celebrity chef Delia Smith is famous for causing 'offline' Slashdot effects by recommending each time she starts a TV series a select group of cooking hardware (pans, utensils etc.) and ingredients (a particular brand of sea salt, for example). These have a tendency to immediately start vanishing from shops (via the checkouts) at an astounding rate, which breeds newspaper stories about how fast they're selling which makes even more people want to buy them...
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
I think one of the first slashdot effects was for a webserver in Purdue, with a professor's home page about lighting charcoal fires using liquid oxygen. It was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the server melted down quickly.
I can't find a date, as his site has been changed to "The people in charge have requested this web site be removed. 2/6/2003 --ghg". Sad. It was really cool, with lots of pictures, movies, etc.
Anyway, I think it was like '92 or '94 or somewhere around there.
In a fair number of cases, it's stupidity that does it. Example: back when I worked for Sun, one of our customers was A Big Speciality Retailer (I'm a little limited here, but ABRS sells stuff that is big at Christmas for small humans, okay?) The CEO, P.H. Boss, had decided that a web presence was the Next Big Thing, so he'd hired a couple guys to build a web site, which they did in good ars Technica fashion, using tcl on a little bitty Sun server -- as I recall it was a single processor desktop box, like a 250. Connected to a DSL line, I believe.
Mr. Boss thought this was such a great site that he went out and made a $50 million advertising buy, nationally, starting at Thanksgiving. What he didn't do was tell the technical people.
The result was that everyone's mom left the Thanksgiving football games, logged on and tried to hit the server. Later measures suggested the server peaked at more than 1000 hits/sec. Needless to say, this served as a very effective smoke test, and sure enough the server smoked.
Old P.H. was most disturbed with the technical people, with Sun, and with the whole web thing -- he couldn't understand why he couldn't spend $10K on a web site and $50 million on advertising and get perfect performance.