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?"
I've seen memepool /. sites in the past...
Drudgel disasters
Limbaugh
Fark
MSNBC
Slate
CNN
Natura
National disasters
etc.
It seems like you're just coming up with questions for the sake of asking a question. That's the epitome of boring. Responding to such a question is only marginally less boring.
I have been pwned because my
Fark drives a few servers into the ground every day.
Since you posted the link, I guess it's that time of the month again?
I've noticed that some of the big news sites (eg: abcnews.com / msnbc.com) often tend to avoid linking to sites that they mention in stories.
I've been infuriated several times being unable to find a link to a site that they were talking about. I originally thought that perhaps it was because they were afraid they would loose page views if their readers discover those other sites.
Now I'm not so sure. After seeing the number of sites that Slashdot destroys on a daily basis, someone much bigger (cnn.com, etc) could do much more damage than Slashdot ever could if they linked from a high-profile story to a small site.
This poses an interesting problem. As people clump around the large popular sites, links between some sites will become one-way. That is, the smaller can link to the bigger, but not vice-versa. The web is no longer equal. At what point does this become a form of self-censorship with knowledge hosted on smaller sites unaccessable to the masses?
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...
SA has the added trick of mentioning if the page has a guestbook. All sorts of fun things to do with guestbooks, from ASCII-art renderings of goatse to, well, ASCII-art renderings of tubgirl.
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.