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Surviving Slashdotting with a Small Server

Posted by michael on from the soon-to-be-an-oreilly-book dept.

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?"

14 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah but it is a small home page... by twoslice · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is a total of 80K of information on the entire front page! Dig a little deeper guys and perhaps we can find a few gigantic image downloads. If you find any do share =)

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  2. Nice but your big pipes the real secret by plierhead · · Score: 2, Informative
    Nice work, but of course your amazing resilience to the multi-headed hydra that is the slashdot audience is all to do with your BIG PIPE and nothing much to do with your dual headed linux configuration.

    While your setup may make you real safe from machine outages, the effects of a slashdotting are to flood your resources rather than break them. So your configuration gives you at best the performance of two machines instead of one - which you could also have achieved by just ramping up the CPU or memory.

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  3. Re:That hits graph by xyvimur · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not quite - look at the plot it is monthly plot - there are 31 bars - one for each day. If we had daily plot - the time zone effect would be visible...
    However I don't know how to explain this phenomenon (Slashdot is good for making research and writing some thesis).

  4. Advice: add trailing slash to URLs if needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    Add / to directory URLS, that will avoid a 301 redirection (/foo -> /foo/).


    BTW, using static pages also helps too. What is more, the "how to not survive" includes "generate content dynamically every time".

  5. Re:Well its sorta dead by Latent+IT · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are you serious? Because... this is what I get:

    Pinging geology.heroy.smu.edu [129.119.223.84] with 32 bytes of data:

    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=58ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=56ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=58ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=74ms TTL=232
    Reply from 129.119.223.84: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=232 ...blah,blah,blah...

    Ping statistics for 129.119.223.84:
    Packets: Sent = 16, Received = 16, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
    Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 56ms, Maximum = 74ms, Average = 60ms

    I mean, that's pretty damn smooth for a 30 minute old story. That's probably peak /. effect time, too. I'm really proud of them, and their little beige boxes. =)

  6. Re:well golly gee... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Informative

    nahhh... you can survuve a slashdotting much easier...

    simply use thttpd.

    it has throttling built in so that the slashdotting wont take down the server. It simply stops serving images at anything but a really slow rate and eliminates multiple requests from same hosts... (A bitch for NAT'ed companies)

    There are httpd servers out there that are much better than apache for handling insane loads.

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  7. Exponentially decaying attention span? by localroger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, I noticed that too.

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  8. Here are the testing materials by krir · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here are some mpeg files from their server: 3.8mb , 3.6mb and 320kb

  9. NAT'd companies by midgley · · Score: 2, Informative

    Should have squid cache running inside their network, so only one request for a given file should be necessary.

  10. Re:Third Time's a Charm? by Syre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Static content is right.

    In 1998 I was working at a startup and we served Olympics news to Excite.com, which was one of the very largest sites on the web back then. Excite linked to pages on our server which were at some URL like olympics.excite.com that pointed to us.

    What they didn't know was that we were serving all this off of ONE Sun Ultra 1 workstation on my desk (which was all we could afford at the time). I had it set up with Squid so everything was coming out of memory.

    It worked fine, even at peak times everything popped up about as fast as any other page on Excite.

    Moral: if you need speed and the page doesn't really have to be dynamic make it static or cache it.

  11. Yes - Here is the URL link to the benchmarks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/microsoft/ ms_competitive_webbench_performance.pdf

  12. Re:well golly gee... by Syre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Vignette is a rather trivial hack which was developed at C|Net and licensed to Vignette. It basically just writes out static pages, nothing fancy.

    As soon as Vignette licensed it, they were able to claim C|Net as a "Big Customer", which of course was a fib. This let them sell loads of software to organizations that didn't know any better.

    Moral of the story? Static pages are a great idea. If you can't do static easily, put a cache in front of your dynamic pages and decide how dynamic you really need them (Is 15 minutes delayed OK for you or is each page totally dynamic?). You don't need to spend $250K for Vignette to get this to work. In fact, you can do it with free software quite easily.

    Web caching and optimization is a big topic but in general the more clever you can be the less money you have to spend on big iron.

  13. I survived :D by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    with a k7-1300, Apache without php or any dynamic stuff, static pages, and a little 256/128k DSL connection... the linked file from Slashdot frontpage was 60kb long in my server... and it resisted it surprisingly well

  14. TUX is another soultion by linuxperformer · · Score: 2, Informative
    One can effectively employ the TUX Web server on such situations. Especially if the pages to be served are entirely static in nature (TUX can manage dynamic content as well, though not its forte), TUX is the simplest solution. We once tried to serve the State Secondary School exam results here in Kerala, India using this technique and the performance was pretty impressive. It was accomplished with a P IV Compaq desktop PC with 256 MB of RAM. A write up is available at Tux@Play.

    So if your site is slashdotted, churn out a static version of the pages which are likely to be pulled most and hand them over to a TUX server. Sit back and enjoy the traffic!