Slashdot Mirror
Assorted Slashdot Updates
As you probably noticed, the Server really bogged
down today. The reason is quite simple: Katz's story,
with about 500 comments weighed in at about a meg.
70 httpd's trying to serve a one meg file (which takes 2-3 minutes
for most of you to download) perhaps a dozen times a second.
Do the math *grin*.
So I have a server level setting that will enforce Comment Limits
when we get bogged. This will annoy the heck out of
some how you, but it vastly speeds up page loads.
After that mess, I'm glad to have some good news: I
brought the 2500 stories online that I yanked awhile back when we were
getting overloaded (mostly stories from late 97 early 98)
so you can search for them again. More random musings
are attached below.
I changed the numbered links on the homepage (and
the word 'XX Bytes in Body') to link to the article instead of
to the comments page, so you can cleanly use them instead of
the 'Read More' link to browse at -1 or 'No Comments' mode,
and still read the article contents. Thanks to the 8
billion of you who asked for that one :)
I added a Default Comment Limit now. Originally the limit was 50,000 (in other words, never :) but I've changed that to 100. This won't happen much, but it will be a good line of defense when those stories get really huge. You can still change that number in your user preferences if it annoys you. Your user preference will always take priority, unless the server goes into Overload mode.
Finally, I wanna strut a bit: Since we brought the old archives back online, Slashdot now has over 5400 stories in the database. Over 3300 of them were posted by yours truly, which strangely seems to explain my lack of a social life at this point :) Anyway, I just thought that was cool.
slashdot has been bad for a while now, even while viewing the static pages (index.shtml). cachedot was much better for that. Please fix the dns entry. Thanks CT.
That Katz article hit a nerve. It got linked to from other sites. My girlfriend had been depressed about the shootings, so I thought I'd email her a link to the Katz story (not that it would lift her spirits or anything), but she had already read it! My girlfriend, the English major, had read an article on Slashdot without me pointing it out (which, if I recall, I've never done before anyway).
Um, folks -- with all due respect to BSD,
and using squid to reverse-proxy, what I
think Rob may have been getting at is this:
1 Mb file, served 12 times/sec.:
1,000,000 x 12 x 8 =~ 100 Mbit/sec. Last
time I checked, a T-3 was approx. 45 Mb/s.
You could be running a Cray, and as long
as your pipe ain't large enough, your pages
are gonna be slow.