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

well golly gee...

[JeanBaptiste]

(also having a university-supplied BIG PIPE doesn't hurt).

well there you go... having a massive amount of bandwidth will allow you to survive a slashdotting. In most cases of slashdotting, I dont think the server was the bottleneck... its no problem for a server to dish out static pages... its the bandwidth, especially for serving pictures or videos....

Is it decaying attention span?

[Eevee]

Or is it where the article is at any given time? Top of front page gives lots of hits. As it drifts down, the hits slow as fewer read; to the sidebar, fewer but still substantial hits; then off to the specialty pages such as Science or Games, then only a few will read.

Of course, the only test would be to repost the article and see if there's the same number of hits... Nah, slashdot would never go for duplicate stories.

Re:Third Time's a Charm?

[BWJones]

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

Oh, come on. Even my little old G3 iMac is capable of handling quite a load from Slashdot and this site is serving up graphics intensive stuff. What you need to prevent a good Slashdotting is bandwidth that universities provide. T3 backbone connections are a wonderful thing. :-)

Go ahead click all you want.