The Power Of The Slashdot

Slashdot is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, geek site on the net. They post “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” They really don’t post that much, only a dozen of so news pieces per day. To get your articles featured on the front page of Slashdot is known as being Slashdotted.

Being Slashdotted does amazing things. You see, at any given time there are up to 85,000 users log onto Slashdot reading the news. So when a new article gets posted, all these readers click on the link to read the full story. The problem with that is most people don’t have the server power to handle a Slashdot. The end results; your server dies from the flood of Slashdot readers trying to read your article. As the day goes by, your news will make its way down the Slashdot page until it’s moved to page 2. Then the huge flood of traffic suddenly stops, just like that. Slashdot has been described as an internet rave party. These Slashdotters come crashing into your server, makes a huge mess of the place and then leaves you to clean it up.

I am writing this because today, I got slashdotted. It’s not the first time I’ve been Slashdotted. However, today’s Slashdot was especially big because of what the article was talking about - a new keyboard that has only 53 keys. The Slashdot came at 6AM this morning and by 6PM this evening; nearly 100,000 Slashdot readers had read the article. My servers didn’t hold up very well under the load of the Slashdot. I will have to look at beefing it up.