Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!
Wait... is this a challenge?
Mike
They are asking for another test.
What's in a sig?
Thou shall not survive thrice. You're insolence will not be tolerated. You'll servers will suffer a slashdotting not hence seen....
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.
Just under 40,000 hits in the busiest day... this is a slashdotting? Come back when you get into the millions. :)
Anybody else observed similar phenomena?
Nope. In our jobs they make us do work.
Lets help them out.
:; do wget http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/venus/mpeg/atl a1.mpg -O /dev/null -o /dev/null ; done
while
Don't forget to fix the space in the URL.
Get your own free personal location tracker
They're just begging for a 'real' test... ... such as everyone downloading this:
:p
;)
ar405eng.exe (5.41 MB)
from their webserver
5.41MB per slashdot reader should provide a test worth of such a fat pipe
Mod the parent up!!!
And download those MPEGs...
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"
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
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.
/.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.
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
It is called Geek A.D.D.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Commander Taco will repost it on Tuesday....
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.
this is a sig.