* * * * *
                                        
                      Notes on surviving a Slashdot Effect
                                        
> If you read “meta” sites like Slashdot (News for Nerds. Stuff that
> matters.) [1], Kuro5hin (technology and culture, from the trenches) [2],
> Fark (It's not news, it's Fark.com) [3], Met4filter (natch) (nothing much
> there) [4], and Memepool (science friction) [5] you've probably encountered
> links to stories that you can't reach—namely because the act of linking to
> a server not prepared for massive traffic has brought down the server, or
> worse, put the hapless soul over their bandwidth cap denying any use to
> anyone for the rest of the month or day or whatever time period the ISP
> (Internet Service Provider) or hosting provider uses to allocate bandwidth.
> 

“The ethics of linking (The ethics of linkage) [6]”

Mark [7] and I have often gone back and forth about what we would need to do
to survive a slashdotting (Slashdot Effect) [8] if we ever got linked. Most
of the solutions we've come up with so far center on distributing the
affected site(s) to other servers and round-robining (is that a term?)
between them (or some other form of load balancing). So far, that hasn't been
a problem (and thankfully—we both have fears of being slashdotted and finding
the slagged remains of the 33MHz (megaHertz) 486 that is currently our
server).

But one of the suggestions [9] in the “The ethics of linkage” [10] is to
redirect all requests back to Google [11] as they can probably can't be
slashdotted at all. By using mod_rewrite [12] you can probably do something
along the lines of:

> RewriteEngine on
> RewriteBase   /
> # untested!  Use at own risk!
> # be sure to change domain after "cache:" as needed
> RewriteCond   %{HTTP_REFERER}% ^http://.*slashdot.org.*
> RewriteRule   ^.*$ http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:boston.conman.org/$1 [R][L]
> 

But it would only help if the URL (Uniform Resource Locator)s that are being
slashdotted exist in the Google cache [13]; otherwise it does no good. For
instance this entry [14], the very one you are reading now, has yet (as of
January 10^th, 2003) to be read and cached by Google [15], and it probably
won't be cached for some time. So I can only hope that if this article gets
slashdotted, it's after Google has googled it.

Which means that it is still a good idea to think of other ways of surviving
a slashdotting, but for an ad-hoc method, this is probably a decent solution
until we get something better into place.

[1] http://slashdot.org/
[2] http://www.kuro5hin.org/
[3] http://www.fark.com/
[4] http://www.met4filter.org/
[5] http://www.memepool.com/
[6] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/4/125411/1900
[7] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[8] http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci214064,00.html
[9] http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/1/4/125411/1900/8#8
[10] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/4/125411/1900
[11] http://www.google.com/
[12] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html
[13] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GoogleCache
[14] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/01/10.1
[15] http://www.google.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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