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The postscript to the article caught my eye: "Update: A Slashdotting is about 6000 hits these days, if you were wondering." Is slashdot's glory fading, or was

by hapless 14y ago

The postscript to the article caught my eye: "Update: A Slashdotting is about 6000 hits these days, if you were wondering." Is slashdot's glory fading, or was 6,000 hits an hour a catastrophic event years ago? I remember "slashdotting" being a regular phenomenon. CoralCache and Google's cached pages were the only way around it.

chris_wot 14y ago
I saw that on David Gerard's Facebook wall. Slashdot is sadly on the wane.
mikeash 14y ago
It takes surprisingly few hits to knock a fragile web site down, although I'm sure that's way lower than from peak too. Most common is poorly configured WordPress installations which will fall over in the slightest breeze. For a minor comparison, a Daring Fireball link was worth about 20,000 hits/day or 50,000 hits over a weekend last time I got one, and DF knocks down sites with some regularity.
- davidgerard 14y ago
  The site lives on a cruddy VM belonging to a friend at a cost of $0 and worth every penny. But WP-SuperCache is holding up okay in the onslaught of hits from HN - which I'm actually noticing unlike the Slashdot numbers. I'll look at the numbers tomorrow and let you know what an HN-dotting is like :-)
  - davidgerard 14y ago
    Update: it's not so much HN as Techdirt http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120908/02103120318/wikitravel-wikimedia-are-legal-battle-not-over-creative-commons.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120908/02103120318/wikitr... .
  - davidgerard 14y ago
    It's a day later. Total hits with HN as referrer: about 3300, which is much less than Slashdot, but they mostly came in the first hour or two. This was enough to make the server whimper slightly. Zero hits with Techdirt as referrer, which makes me wonder if my stats (awstats working directly on the Apache logs) aren't utterly bogus.
davidgerard 14y ago
After experiencing the full whipping-with-a-wet-feather of this slashdotting, I edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect to put much of the talk of Slashdot itself in the past tense. (See article talk page to argue the point - Wikipedia-quality sources needed.)
ilamont 14y ago
I think Slashdot lost a lot of the gadget, platform, and some programming discussions to tech blogs, reddit, and sites like HN. Back in the day, /. was a major destination site for people who wanted to talk about Apple, Microsoft, hardware, etc. I remember long threads during MacWorld in which people would dissect Jobs' latest announcement. Nowadays, its core audience seems to have rallied around some strong niches like YRO and Linux. For example, "Ask Slashdot: How would you fix the Linux desktop?" was started on Friday and already has more than 1000 comments (http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/09/07/1720206/ask-slashdot-how-would-you-fix-the-linux-desktop http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/09/07/1720206/ask-slashdot-...).
- icebraining 14y ago
  Ask Slashdot are not good examples, in my opinion, since they encourage extreme bike-shedding and me-too posts. In any case, the most commented stories where all political nature, even ten years ago: http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml
rhizome 14y ago
The general level of performance in programming and sysadmin has gotten steadily worse over the past several years through the use of self-deployment type hosting that tends to be expensive at the levels required to withstand decent traffic. The downside of Heroku is that you might be successful.
alephnil 14y ago
I experienced a server that was slashdoted back in 2001, which resulted in 1,5 million hits, most of it during in a 12 hours period. That should be around 100.000 hits an hour. If a server get 6000 hits an hour, that is less than two accesses per second. If a server can't handle that, then I'm not impressed.

by hapless 14y ago

chris_wot 14y ago

I saw that on David Gerard's Facebook wall. Slashdot is sadly on the wane.

mikeash 14y ago

It takes surprisingly few hits to knock a fragile web site down, although I'm sure that's way lower than from peak too. Most common is poorly configured WordPress installations which will fall over in the slightest breeze. For a minor comparison, a Daring Fireball link was worth about 20,000 hits/day or 50,000 hits over a weekend last time I got one, and DF knocks down sites with some regularity.

davidgerard 14y ago
The site lives on a cruddy VM belonging to a friend at a cost of $0 and worth every penny. But WP-SuperCache is holding up okay in the onslaught of hits from HN - which I'm actually noticing unlike the Slashdot numbers. I'll look at the numbers tomorrow and let you know what an HN-dotting is like :-)
- davidgerard 14y ago
  Update: it's not so much HN as Techdirt http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120908/02103120318/wikitravel-wikimedia-are-legal-battle-not-over-creative-commons.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120908/02103120318/wikitr... .
- davidgerard 14y ago
  It's a day later. Total hits with HN as referrer: about 3300, which is much less than Slashdot, but they mostly came in the first hour or two. This was enough to make the server whimper slightly. Zero hits with Techdirt as referrer, which makes me wonder if my stats (awstats working directly on the Apache logs) aren't utterly bogus.

davidgerard 14y ago

After experiencing the full whipping-with-a-wet-feather of this slashdotting, I edited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect to put much of the talk of Slashdot itself in the past tense. (See article talk page to argue the point - Wikipedia-quality sources needed.)

ilamont 14y ago

I think Slashdot lost a lot of the gadget, platform, and some programming discussions to tech blogs, reddit, and sites like HN. Back in the day, /. was a major destination site for people who wanted to talk about Apple, Microsoft, hardware, etc. I remember long threads during MacWorld in which people would dissect Jobs' latest announcement. Nowadays, its core audience seems to have rallied around some strong niches like YRO and Linux. For example, "Ask Slashdot: How would you fix the Linux desktop?" was started on Friday and already has more than 1000 comments (http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/09/07/1720206/ask-slashdot-how-would-you-fix-the-linux-desktop http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/09/07/1720206/ask-slashdot-...).

icebraining 14y ago
Ask Slashdot are not good examples, in my opinion, since they encourage extreme bike-shedding and me-too posts. In any case, the most commented stories where all political nature, even ten years ago: http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml

rhizome 14y ago

The general level of performance in programming and sysadmin has gotten steadily worse over the past several years through the use of self-deployment type hosting that tends to be expensive at the levels required to withstand decent traffic. The downside of Heroku is that you might be successful.

alephnil 14y ago

I experienced a server that was slashdoted back in 2001, which resulted in 1,5 million hits, most of it during in a 12 hours period. That should be around 100.000 hits an hour. If a server get 6000 hits an hour, that is less than two accesses per second. If a server can't handle that, then I'm not impressed.