Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. Third Time's a Charm? by sweeney37 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Wait... is this a challenge?

    Mike

    1. Re:Third Time's a Charm? by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    2. Re:Third Time's a Charm? by FCKGW · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even though only a small percentage of Slashdot readers look at the comments, Slashdot's readership is so huge that the number of people reading the comments is still significant. 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. It didn't kill my server (Pentium 133MHz, 64MB RAM, Debian 3.0, Apache 1.3.26, 3000/256 cable) and didn't result in any nasty letters from my ISP.

      OT: It was interesting reading the logs. There are quite a few Linux users on here (but even more Windows users), and I saw lots of people using Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. Compare that to sites aimed at the average user where 95% of visitors are using IE or AOL and don't know that there's anything better out there.

      --
      It's an operating system, not a religion.
  2. Apparently... by yanbusa · · Score: 5, Funny

    They are asking for another test.

    --
    What's in a sig?
  3. Thou shall not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  4. well golly gee... by JeanBaptiste · · Score: 5, Insightful
    (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....
    1. Re:well golly gee... by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It simply stops serving images at anything but a really slow rate

      What's the point? Either way you're slashdotted.

      Besides, I think in the case of server overload (as opposed to network overload), throttling will only exacerbate the problem by increasing the number of slow clients you have to deal with. This is the #1 bottleneck in web servers, the more clients you have, the longer it takes to deal with each one of them. Losts of processes to switch between, long arrays in an out of select(), etc.

      Also, when a user doesn't get a page in his browser, what does he do? He clicks the link again and again.... even more connections to handle.

      Really the only way to cure an overloaded server is to drop incoming SYNs. Any other measure is just pouring gasoline on the fire.

  5. Is it decaying attention span? by Eevee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. A.D.D. crowd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Nope... by ryanvm · · Score: 5, Funny

    Anybody else observed similar phenomena?

    Nope. In our jobs they make us do work.

  8. Pretty simple... by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My server has been slashdotted a few times and I can tell you it's pretty simple to not get overloaded.

    The first time I learned my lesson. The server was on a T1 line that was 2/3 full already, and slashdot linked to a page full of large photos. That'll kill your link pretty quickly. Low-budget solution: sign up for a burstable web hosting account somewhere and just put all your large images there.

    Later when we got some actual office space for the business, I moved the main server up to a colo facility in fremont. All slahdottable content is hosted there on a fast server with a 100mbps ethernet link. Other oddball services that need their own machine are hosted from the other end of a point-to-point T1 line going directly back to the office from the colo.

    So depending on your budget it's really not hard to set up your site to survive a slashdotting. If you don't have a lot of dough to spend but you want to run your own server for configurability/security reasons, just host the static stuff somewhere else. Or if you're serving enough to make it economical, get a colo account with a burstable link.

    There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case. It's caused by insufficient bandwith. This in turn may cause server overload because of too many slow clients being connected, but that is purely a secondary effect.

  9. Testing, testing... by Mish · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 ;)

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

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

  11. exponentially decaying attention span? by jazman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.