Geeking Out: Surviving a Slashdot Pickup
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Allow me to geek out for a moment here. I've written about the effect of a Slashdot pickup on your RSS feed — though yesterday's pickup of the 10 Ways to Immediately Start Saving Money by Get Rich Slowly almost got me to my RSS goal — but this a great story about one blogger who was able to handle the Slashdot effect on an old 466 PC.
Once I put the box back in, it took a bit more Apache tweaking to get it perfect, but eventually my spare parts Celeron 466 was handling a Slashdotting at only 30% CPU utilization!
When you're a small to mid-size online product developer, getting hit with a major traffic boost can be both good and bad.
Obviously, the traffic is great, but if you (and your servers) aren't prepared for it, your chance at making it big could be greatly diminished.
On the ironic side, the Celeron story hit the front page of Digg today … and the traffic crashed the server. Hah!
Dusty over at Anecdota has put together a great list of Bandwidth spike stories, comparing the effect of traffic boosts across the Web.
It's a great read if you have the time. Consider reading it an investment into the day you get that huge boost.
Filed in Web
