Surviving Slashdotting with a Small Server

S.BartFarst writes "Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived! Implementation of a two-headed redundant hardware scheme using linux virtual server and backup and failover capabilities enhanced by the linux high-availability tools has produced a nifty low-cost solution. Gotta love those little white boxes! (also having a university-supplied BIG PIPE doesn't hurt). More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters. Anybody else observed similar phenomena?"

Comments

Third Time's a Charm?

[sweeney37]

Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!

Wait... is this a challenge?

Mike

Re:Third Time's a Charm?

[bad_fx]

Yeah come on folks, do your bit for slashdot's reputation!

Re:Third Time's a Charm?

[Stonent1]

What they didn't know was that we were serving all this off of ONE Sun Ultra 1 workstation on my desk

Meanwhile, after work, the Filipino cleaning lady that doesn't speak english (Do not unplug Olypic news server!) unplugs it so she can plug in her vacuum.

Re:Third Time's a Charm?

[TheMidget]

It's not enough to kill a server, but I posted links to three images, around 80KB each, on my home server a few days ago fairly deep down in the discussion and got 3904 hits from it.

Wow. Impressive. However, I would have hoped that by now the Slashbots would have learned not to click on image links occuring in a random Slashdot comment...

Apparently...

[yanbusa]

They are asking for another test.

Weeee....

[Ridge]

Third time's a char... DOH!

Heh, well they're actually still kicking, oh well, it would've been so apropos.

Thou shall not

[Anonymous Coward]

Thou shall not survive thrice. You're insolence will not be tolerated. You'll servers will suffer a slashdotting not hence seen....

Re:Thou shall not

[Sethus]

Are you sure this is the third time? I count five...

[Arthur, King of the Britons] One, Two, Five!
[Knight] Three, Sir!
[Arthur, King of the Britons] Three!
**HALLELUIAH**
*BooM*

well...

[painehope]

I've got some exponentially decaying pieces of chicken on my table...

and some exponentially growing forms of life in some beer cans...

does that count?

A.D.D. crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters.

Well, I was gonna reply, but I forgot what the post was about.

Re:A.D.D. crowd

[macshune]

I think the decaying attention spans of slashdot users has to do with the rise of modern media and the fast-paced moving images in the contemporary media paradigm. Further, I think that A.D.D. is the result of HEY!!! LET'S GO SWING!!!!!!

Oh, oh, the dupes, the dupes.

[slackingme]

"Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!"

I hope the dupe jokes that get posted are better than what I had here before I decided to just post this in hopes of drawing better jokes later in the thread. They weren't good! But when are they?

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

This is almost as stupid as wearing a mask of Donald Rumsfeld and visiting 3ID troops to tell them "Are we planning on letting you go home anytime soon? Gosh, no!"

These SMU guys are obviously begging for it, I say we give them hell!

A slashdotting?

[Chmarr]

Just under 40,000 hits in the busiest day... this is a slashdotting? Come back when you get into the millions. :)

Nope...

[ryanvm]

Anybody else observed similar phenomena?

Nope. In our jobs they make us do work.

The Slashdot worm.

[caluml]

Lets help them out.

while :; do wget http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/venus/mpeg/atl a1.mpg -O /dev/null -o /dev/null ; done

Don't forget to fix the space in the URL.

Re:The Slashdot worm.

[Pharmboy]

i already posted mine before i saw yours. my solution was

while true
do
wget --delete-after -m -p http://www.geology.smu.edu/
done

which has the advantage of not only hammering their bandwidth, but since it requests everything on the entire site, including images and many multiple mb files, then the server cant cache it all, and will have to read from the disk alot. also, since it deletes after downloading, it doesn't take up your precious drive space, lol.

but nice to know another sick fucker had the same basic idea.

Testing, testing...

[Mish]

They're just begging for a 'real' test... ... such as everyone downloading this:

ar405eng.exe (5.41 MB)

from their webserver :p

5.41MB per slashdot reader should provide a test worth of such a fat pipe ;)

I know...

[Dark Lord Seth]

More interesting is the documentation of the apparent exponentially decaying attention span of slashd

Huh? What?

Somebody's...

[SerialHistorian]

...a glutton for punishment!!! Either that, or they want to test it some more. Do your worst, slashdotters!

Re:Here are the testing materials

[in7ane]

Mod the parent up!!!

And download those MPEGs...

Re:Clever, clever

[ashitaka]

Feel sorry for them on Monday morning though...

Monday morning!!?? You're kidding, right?

They have already noticed the "exponentially decaying attention span" of Slashdotters.

By Monday morning this story and the site will be relegated to un-clicked graveyard of "Older Stuff"

exponentially decaying attention span?

[jazman]

Not sure how you get that from the graph. For myself, I didn't know what the subject matter was, so I opened the window, went "ugh, geology", and closed it more or less straight away. Ok, perhaps this proves the point - for subjects I'm not interested in I have a short attention span, but this doesn't mean I have a SAS for everything.

You get an exponentially decaying number of hits, yes, but how many of those are people doing exactly what I did and not staying, as opposed to those who stay a while because they find geology interesting?

The last time you were /.ted, did the graph decay at the same rate or did it take longer to go down? If it took longer that would suggest shortening ASs, but then did you have anything of special interest up at the time? Bung some pr0n up there and see if the, er, bulge is a different shape.

Re:Pretty simple...

[evilviper]

There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case.

It's more likely to be server overload here than anywhere else, don't you think?

Dear Slashdot,
I just installed a webserver on my Gameboy. Would you please turn it into a smoldering hole in the ground?

Thanks!

Also, with a little smarts from the server, you can prevent bandwidth overload. All you really need is to limit the number of concurrent users that can be connected to your webserver. That way, you only have (let's say:) 10 users loading the bandwidth-intensive pics at any one time, and everyone else is looking at a simple error page that automatically trys to re-load the normal page every minute or so.

It seems simple enough to me, and it's done places like spamcop.net, I wonder why I never see /.ed sites configured that way.

Re:Well its sorta dead

[revmoo]

And I am on a very reliable 600 up 400 down ADSL connection.

Apparently not :-)

Bring Up The Holy Slashdot!

[niko9]

Taco:Yes, of course! The Holy Slashdot of OSDL! 'Tis one of the sacred relics Brother Cowboy Neal carries with him. Brother Neal! Bring up the Holy Slashdot!

AC's chanting: Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem.

Brother Neal: Armaments, chapter two, verse nine to twenty one.

Brother Neal: And Saint Cowboy Neal raised the Slashdot up high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy Slashdot that, with it, Thou mayest slashdot Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy'. And the Lord did grin, and the AC's did feast upon first posts, trolls, GNAA posts, and...

Taco: Skip it a bit, Brother.

Brother Neal: And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou click on the holy link called Slashdot. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, clickest thou holy Slashdot of OSDL towards thy server, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'

Taco: Amen

exponentially decaying attention

[QEDog]

"exponentially decaying attention span of slashdotters"

It is called Geek A.D.D.

Re:Clever, clever

[Anonymous Coward]

Commander Taco will repost it on Tuesday....

How to load test a server

[maddskillz]

Seems like an easy way to get your setup tested

Probably a dumb question

[Lord_Dweomer]

I don't know much regarding the technical details of this, so pardon my ignorance, but why is it that Slashdot never gets slashdotted?

Re:Probably a dumb question

[limbostar]

Slashdot doesn't serve much in the way of images -- most of the content is textual -- so the bandwidth doesn't fill up as easily as it would if they were serving movies.

The server configuration is designed to handle the load, with multiple servers, load-balanced arrays, that sort of thing, whereas the people they link to are typically running on shared servers, or have only a single server.

Slashdot uses cached pages to avoid hitting the DB on every page load (mostly for the front pages), whereas smaller sites can get away with making a direct connection and doing more processor-intensive queries. Until they get linked by a site like Slashdot, anyway.

Slashdot's DB server is most likely of the 'fire-breathing god' variety, able to handle standard Slashdot traffic without too much difficulty. Smaller sites typically have the database server on the same machine as the webserver, and sometimes both are shared.

In general, it's all a matter of configuration. When you run a moderately successful small site, you're generally prepared for the amount of traffic you have, plus or minus 50%. Traffic generally grows slowly, so you have time to make adjustments when things start to get tight.

When Slashdot links your site, you get a huge influx of traffic to a site that is designed to handle a tiny fraction of that traffic. It leads to badness.

It's like trying to put an elephant into your freezer. If you're prepared for it, you have a big walk-in freezer. But most sites only need a small half-height fridge to keep their beer cold.

Re:That hits graph

[freeweed]

Or dupes.

Re:well golly gee...

[0x12d3]

huh huh. Hey Butthead he said "big pipe"

--uuhh. That was cool.