Postscript to the Slashdot Effect June 1st, 2006 by Arto
The actual slashdotting is now well over, and I’m glad to say we weathered the storm without any incidents. With the help of our sysadmin, Niall, we distributed the load across three dedicated servers in geographically diverse locations, and none of the boxes even broke a sweat.
However, that’s not to suggest the servers were idling; on the contrary, they were each servicing up to hundreds requests per second. I usually keep a monitoring console open to the servers, and when CmdrTaco originally posted the announcement, it was immediately obvious that something had happened. The staff in our colocation facilities noticed, too — it didn’t take many minutes for the first e-mail alert to arrive. (I fancy they heard the dual-CPU fans suddenly spooling up to maximum effect, but of course, their monitoring systems just warned them of a possible DDoS attack.)
Here’s a nice bandwidth graph from one of our servers, covering the first 24 hours. I thought the start of the slashdotting might be obvious enough that I won’t bother to specifically point it out:
On the software side of things, I was especially pleased to discover that no adjustments to Lighttpd’s settings were necessary in order for it to handle massive concurrency.
The load averages remained very reasonable, under 15.0 even with the nightly full backup running, except for a human error that resulted in one of the servers becoming momentarily unresponsive with a load average of almost 500.0 (oops); this was remedied within a minute.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get to test our server systems’ capacity to the fullest under a simultaneous, combined Slashdot/Digg/Reddit assault, since both Digg and Reddit linked to the actual design preview, and the direct links pointing here from the comments didn’t bring in much traffic to constitute a hammering. Oh well, live to fight another day.
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Congratulations, Bro!
My brother Alex has just won the Slashdot redesign contest! Have a look at the official announcement and Alex’s blog entry.
The contest was announced a month ago, and has garnered wide interest in geekdom, not to mention a huge number of submiss
October 5th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Nice.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
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