Slashdot Mirror
Addendum to The Slashdot Effect Internet Paper
Spock_NPA writes "An addendum to the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper is available here. It details the effect of Slashdot on the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Seriously, the white paper and the addendum are interesting looks into many abject statistics...bundled up and analyzed to make sense against the fact that "[insert Slashdot featured server name here]'s connection is crap" or that their machines can't handle the load. I shouldn't complain, my sites are run on a shared server that wouldn't dream of handling Slashdot-caliber traffic just for a single hosting client.
Interesting white paper, I enjoyed reading it.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
I'd love to know the answers to the following:
How many registered people are there on Slashdot ?
How many unregisterered people use Slashdot ?
Maybe Slashdot ought to have a statistics page, showing the effect of the Slashdot effect on Slashdot!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is getting ridiculous. Sad really.
That's what I love about them high-school girls. I get older, they stay the same age... yes they do.
--Wooderson 1976
-- jimmycarter
Isn't it time for the slashdot crew to write a statistical analysis of the reading frequency of the slashdot stories about the slashdot effect papers? If everybody keeps this up, we'll have a new academic subdiscipline in no time! "slashdot science", maybe, or "statistical geekology". If we get the terms 'postmodern' or 'cultural imperialism' into the title as well, we'll be rolling in grant money...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't really find anything wrong with people rushing to post first. Moderate it down as offtopic, sure, but it gives people a sense of accomplishment. Like any game, it's fun for those playing. If I were lucky enough to find a news item with no posts, I'd go at it as quickly as possible. Alas, I don't visit slashdot enough.
--
I'm too lazy to register to post
No, its been ridiculous for quite a while now. At least this dork actually got the first post.
...is there gonna be a SlashDotEffectAddendumAddendum? :)
Seeing as being published on a regular basis seems to be the key to academic funding these days, it looks like someone has found something to keep their career moving.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
"The Slashdot Effect as documented on the addendum documenting the Slashdot Effect on the original article on the Slashdot Effect."
Some
people
have
too
much
time
on
their
hands.
"Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and my monkey" - The Beatles "If you're not part of the solution, you'
What about including a click-through counter in every link that's posted on ./? And then have a top ten ranking which links got clicked most in the last month or so (or maybe ranked by clicks/time unit).
That would also be interesting to get an idea what load these servers have to deal with. I am not sure if the Slashdot Effect paper is really very representative.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Says so in the Addendum.
What i see, is a huge oprotunity(sp?) here. Seeing as to how many people visit This site in particular (not to mention the others), and how much weight slashdot seems to carry on all other inet news folks (wired, msnbc, etc... ).
250 hits per minute. Now we know how big the slashdot effect is. Has anyone else seen surges this big (from 30/min to 250/min) from other sources other that /.?
There is a second resurgence, on a much smaller scale, two day's later which peaks at about 9:30am, with an abrupt fall off and then a re-resurgence around 6pm that day. This is seen in Figure 4. plot. The author scanned the various Linux news web pages for posting of the /. effect article but found none. This small resurgence occurring 2 days after the initial posting by /. is unexplained and open to interpretation.
.htaccess/cgi hacks. I've found some interesting things this way, including links from news sites/mailing-lists/newsgroups from over the world that I wouldn't have found otherwise. A link to the author's paper could have been posted on a russian linux news site, for example.
.html, this isn't a problem as you can have a .htaccess file that specifies something like "AddHandler cgi-script .html" or you can point people to the directory and respecify the DirectoryIndex.
;print;
It's easy to log the referrer in Apache. I do it using a combination of
If you're curious as to how this can be done under Apache, here's a rough description (apologies in advance for any ugly or careless code and any "Slashdot munging" in indentation, etc that may occur).
(1) Point people to a CGI script, not the direct page. If you want this file to end with
(2) Now here's the fun part. The script dumps the page to the requester then logs the interesting environment variables set by Apache.
Example script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
# Give them the page.
open(indexPage, "/path/to/real/content.html");
@fileStats = stat(indexPage);
$modifiedTime = gmtime($fileStats[9]);
$modifiedTime =~ s/^(...) (...) (\d\d?) (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d) (\d\d\d\d)/$1\, $3 $2 $5 $4 GMT/;
# first, print HTTP header
print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "Last-Modified: $modifiedTime\n";
print "Content-Length: $fileStats[7]\n";
print "Accept-Ranges: bytes\n\n";
# then, print body
while(){
}
close(indexPage);
# Now log the information.
$log="../khtmltest.log";
$localtime = `date`;
open(logFile, ">>$log");
print logFile "$localtime";
print logFile "$ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'} - $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}\n";
print logFile "\n";
close(logFile);
Cheers,
Navin.
I'm not sure if I'm babbeling sh*t here or not, but I am ABSOLUTLY SURE I have seen that paper before, reported on /. 6 or 12 months ago. It *MAY* have been the origional but I am fairly certain it was an addendum to the origional reporting the effects of the /. effect on the report of the /. effect.
/. etc... I dunno. Comments included "what next, a report on the /. effect on the report of the report of the report of the /. effect" etc.
The graphs had lines saying when it was posted on betanews,
Again, I may just be dribbling sh*t (or dajavu or something)
anyway.
Cyas
Ah suck, Slashdot did munge the stuff very slightly despite my best efforts and I managed to press "submit" instead of "preview" before fixing some of the code and removing that extraneous ';' before one of the print statements there.
Oh well, if you have trouble figuring it out, you can always email me and ask.
if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate
uptime: 50 days, 21:18, 1 user,
load average: 0.49, 0.35, 0.24
processes: 132
yesterday: 76525
today: 1
ever: 203679322
These stats are shown in a 'slashbox' for registered users. A Custom Page that show these stats along with many other items.
What's missing from the /. stats is the average ratio between 'proccesses' and 'unique visits'. This number would prove valuable. Rob? are you reading this ? :)
Slashdot used to get close to 500,000 hits a day why are the hits so low now? It doesn't make sense that they've had a single hit today either.
actually i think all this "ph1r5t p05t" stuff is rather funny.
My name is Dr. Vinnyboombas and I seek funding for the following research:
Building a quantitative model of Postmodern Slashdot Societies effect on Cultural Imperialism and Statistical Geekology. and ummm oh yea..can I have a supercolider and a mindstorm kit?
Thank you Santa, I've been a good boy this year. :)
Even geeks sleep in on Sunday.
The two-days-later surge would have been easily explained if he had looked at a referer log.
It's the time when the story hits the top of the "older stories" list.
Harald, counter.li.org slashdot victim/beneficary
I would also posture a guess that at least 25% of the people experiencing the /. effect are indeed experiencing normal lag (packets dropped by routers a few hops away) combined with bad timing.
For example: Prime time (United state 7PM to 10PM) evening net use is 'spotty at best'.
The graphs would be more interesting if the vertical axis was log scale.
nah...more likely us lovely Europeans waking up and reading Slashdot with our morning coffee - this is a rather international community here, remember
There won't be an addendum to the addendum. Somewhere in the article, can't remember where, either at the top or the bottom, it claims that there will be no further addendums to this, unless something of educational relevancy comes up. So, as long as we don't do anything educational (ie: crack site and deface it with the theory of relativity), we ought to be safe... : )
You don't need to code this. Apache can log referers and other information. It doesn't do it out of the box, but you can configure it to log just about any way you want.
Check the docs on Apache's logging modules. :)
LOL! A supercolider and a mindstorms kit? What kind of monster are you planning on building? Or are you trying to make a replica of the Penguin Computing Tux that squashed Redmond? ;)
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
California, my ass! What about Alaska and Hawaii? We're tired of beeing second class Americans!
Be warned, Continental United States snobs, you'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes!
(now where's that bottle of S'More Schnapps I was "sampling"?)
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It starts in Nevada, and continues for 12,500 miles in all directions :)
hawk, esq., who refuses to wear those silly eastern ties stolen from 19th century british officers' uniforms
As the subject states, one of my servers gets 600-1000 hits/min on a regular basis. (meaning all damn day). 99% of those hits requires at least 1 MySQL query also and about 30% require at least 2 inserts. This server also does quite a bit of background processing also but is still extremely fast for a dual p2/400.
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
> actually i think all this "ph1r5t p05t" stuff is rather funny.
/. is if you step back and look at it. There's also the meta-moderation that started after the moderation scheme was set up. And then there is the meta-meta-moderation comments that people started making after they noticed the meta-moderation. (It was amazing how quickly the term "meta-moderation" sprang up and came into common use.) Now I'm sure someone will point out that my commenting on meta-meta-moderation may qualify as meta-meta-meta-moderation; and of course you know what the comment on that will qualify for.
A lot of stuff on
Other things are the numerous "that's not worth posting" posts, which always strike me as really ironic, since someone is taking the trouble to comment on something that they say wasn't worth mentioning in the first place.
And then there are the obligatory "that's been mentioned before" posts.
And the "just got to work my political views in" posts, where people can't resist mentioning the moral status of [Bill_Clinton, George_Bush] (almost always in the subject line, since it doesn't do much good to hide inflammatory views down in the body of a post).
I'm sure there are more that I haven't noticed. Perhaps this would be a suitable topic for a companion paper, or at least a Guide to Slashdot.
All in all, I can imagine that this is really an entertaining site for those lurkers with a sense of humor about human nature.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Freshmeat effect seems to be powerful as well, and much easier to achieve than the Slashdot effect (since it's easier to get on Freshmeat). When my `program' (my 15 kB FTP server, now 20 kB) first hit Freshmeat, I got more hits in a single day than I had in a single month. Of course, nowadays linuxberg.com stands for over 80% of my referrals (if you exclude the cases where people have entered the URL directly), I'd suppose. My traffic spikes every time I make a new version and Freshmeat announce it.
Thanks, scoop.
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
If two packets leave their respective servers at the same time, one coming to you at 30ms and 19 hops, and the other at 50ms and 12 hops, which packet will arrive first, and how sooner?
Slashdot math problem from hell
It's amazing though, not one mean hateful post in this whole conversation...
A web server with a story of the slashdot effect on papers about the slasdot effect, undergoing the slashdot effect.
There's no reason for a sig here.
I am such a geek that I found so FUNNY! Nothing like a bit a chemistry humor on a Sunday afternoon to brighten my day...
Teacher: "Is the bond covalent or ionic?"
Student1: "Isn't it ionic?"
Student2: "Don't you think?"
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
or a story on CNN, or... (we got 50x the load we budgeted for, and more than 100x the normal load, but bless Apache, it stayed up and degraded gracefully)
I used to cruise slashdot at a 0 threshhold. A lot of cowards aren't moderated up for saying decent things (remember: AC's aren't ALL bad..), and a lot of decent comments are moderated down. But now, I've become so annoyed with the bad moderation that I cruise at -1 with scores hidden. Why don't we change it so moderators aren't anonymous?
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
Just a thought:
Is this a record for latest first post claim? I mean, we're used to 2 or 3, but 73?
Oh well...
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
It occurred to me that ad banner companies could make a bit of extra cash from the slashdot effect. Suppose you were an ad company with banners at many different sites, if you kept track of which sites were referenced on /., you could sell advertising on those sites at a premium during the /. effect. It would be like buying a spot during the Super Bowl. You're guaranteed to have a whole bunch of eyes look at your ad.
:-)
Of course it probably won't work too well if you're trying to advertise MS Windows 2000
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The world may never know.
Slashdot. Free posts or DIE!!!!!!!
I figure what this really shows is that either too few users use proxy caches or there's too much cachebusting. Squid Now!
Please, please don't implement a click-through counter. On any site. Ever. I used to use Hotbot until they started doing that nonsense. It makes for good data-mining by the proprieters of the site, but it makes it impossible for anybody who isn't Joe Clickblindly to use the site.
:-)
For instance, I like being able to right-click on a link and Copy Shortcut. Also, if the site itself is slow, you have to wait for the counter to register the link, then you get meta-refreshed to the destination. And Slashdot is admittedly a little sluggish from time to time.
If there was some way built into HTML to do a clickthrough transparently, that would be another thing. Of course, I would probablly disable that feature in my browser, but that's another story altogether.
The spike that's referring to occurred several days after the initial /. announcement...
I propose that we launch a massive Slashdot statistics program. It would involve a significant amount of invasion of "privacy", i.e., almost every link off of /. would be logged, but we could get a lot of raw data to look at in interesting ways. Here are a few of my ideas:
There are more! Let someone else suggest them, though. I think that analyzing the raw data gained by these approaches would be a good statistics project for any upper high school or college student. And hey, I like Slashdot, and if I get credit for it, even better! (Well, it would be mostly raw data, not the real site, but still...)
Ken
PS - I would do such a project. Anybody who wouldn't?
I just read somebody else's comment about click-through counters. Post any arguments about that as replys to that comment. (It's a reply to one of the top 5 posts, subject is descriptive. You find it.)
Ken
if it's 250hits per minute, and thats only counting index.html hits, then a server with 9 pictures in the page as well would get 2500 hits per minute...
and if it takes 20 seconds to download the page, then the hits per second increases as these connections overlap seconds..
very easy to overload a server.. just something to think about.
A paper about the Slashdot effect being Slashdotted... Deliciously self-referential!
If you haven't read Hofstadter's books "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Metamagical Themas" you should check them out.
This comment doesn't have an
He probably overclocked it using a 75mhz system bus.
InThane