Load Test the New Slashdot Setup

As many of you have noticed, Slashdot has been pretty bogged as of late, but the end of that is at hand. The new setup has a dedicated SQL box and 3 load balanced http servers. We've been spending the last few months getting everything ready, and now its time for the final check. I'd like to ask you help testing the load balancing stuff: You can access the new system at this address. Its a slightly out of date mirror of Slashdot, but it should be more than enough for us to determine if the new setup can cleanly handle the load. Thanks for you help: If this all goes well, we'll transition to the new setup in the next few days. (And just in time, Slashdot was kicking out like a thousand pages (pages, not hits) a minute earlier today and stuff was really bogging down)

Comments

Why not make slashdot better cacheable?

[Holger]

I was always wondering why slashdot is so heavily depending on dynamically generated pages. Even if just the main page had proper caching information, you could already hand off all the anonymous users (people not logged in) to the worldwide caching hierarchy out there.

See what the cacheability engine on ircache.net has to say about slashdot.org. At least the gifs are cacheable, but why is that "Expires"-Tag set? Do you expect the gifs to change every week?

Flooding moderation (re: LIme aNd c0c0 nutz!!!!)

[mcc]

perhaps this is just another way of "testing" slashdot? although he's testing the wrong server, dagnabbit. He's supposed to be flooding the _test_ server, to see how it stands up. Ha.

A note to Taco-san or other /. admin type people: maybe you should consider adding a special "flood" category to the Moderator list, along with Offtopic and Troll.. then set up the servers in such a way that anything with a "flood" rating would immediately be given a much much shorter amount of space to run before the cutoff for "Read the rest of this comment.." happens. That might help to cut down on scroll times when floods like this one happen, without hurting posts that just happen to be really long.

and God dammit, what the hell IS the name of that "put the lime in the coconut, drink a bowl up" song? that's a cool song but nobody seems to know where i can find it. :P

-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT