I have only ever heard this called the "Hug of Death" not specifically attributed to slashdot.
Slashdot effect
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: Slashdot effect
#12Can someone with some more experience explain why this happens? The most basic webserver, like a TCP socket served from a C program, serving some files etc. can take tens of thousands of requests per second, per core, on reasonably recent hardware. What's going on that's taking down these sites, really, when its not a quota limit?
Hell, if the connection timeouts are long enough and you're waiting for some pooled DB connection, you could run out of ports even if your throughput was high enough.
There are actually a lot of little things to tune if you can't just auto-scale out of a bottleneck.
Re: Slashdot effect
#13"I was there... 3000 years ago."
Re: Slashdot effect
#14I have only ever heard this called the "Hug of Death" not specifically attributed to slashdot.
Back in the early 2000s there weren't that many sites that could direct that sort of traffic to a website.
Re: Slashdot effect
#15Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)
yeah, it's around, but a ghost of its former glory.
I still check t regularly alongside HN. Need a counterpoint to HN submission coverage and crowd-editorial zeitgeist.
Re: Slashdot effect
#16Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)
yeah, it's around, but a ghost of its former glory.
It's sad to see its decline. I started reading right around 2000 and even noticed that it started to decline even as early as 2008, after and around some of its redesigns. I know I quit regularly stopping around there probably around that time too.
Re: Slashdot effect
#17I have only ever heard this called the "Hug of Death" not specifically attributed to slashdot.
The name changed when Slashdot lost significant mindshare among tech nerds.
Re: Slashdot effect
#18Can someone with some more experience explain why this happens? The most basic webserver, like a TCP socket served from a C program, serving some files etc. can take tens of thousands of requests per second, per core, on reasonably recent hardware. What's going on that's taking down these sites, really, when its not a quota limit?
Many blogs are completely dynamic and grab content out of a database on every request. The static site generation style fell out of early fashion when wordpress took over from moveable type, and didn't really return much until jekyll. Even today I think most blogs you see are mostly dynamic with the platforms using caching to avoid hitting the database every time. Most people don't do performance tuning of their blog…
This is very true. A lot of corpsites of SaaS and similar companies run wordpress - i think because it's easy to find a "web developer" who can build very impressive custom themes that you wouldn't even know are blogs. My last company was paying about $500 a month to various "Professional Wordpress Hosting" companies to host their .com -- and they all had spotty downtime records because they were serving everything dynamically. My strategy to fix these has always been to install a "static site generation" plugin, stick the wordpress instance itself on a cheap host behind an IP restriction, and have the site generator plugin publish the site (on every change, which is never even that often) to some static hosting (S3, etc). Saves 99% of the cost and makes the site 50x faster and able to handle infinite traffic. But most companies don't seem to do this, and individual blogs are even less likely to.
Re: Slashdot effect
#19I have only ever heard this called the "Hug of Death" not specifically attributed to slashdot.
that's the redditified babytalk name of the Slashdot effect
Re: Slashdot effect
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah, it's around, but a ghost of its former glory.
I still check t regularly alongside HN. Need a counterpoint to HN submission coverage and crowd-editorial zeitgeist.
Yup, me too. What’s funny is that your slashdot account can make friends (or enemies!) with other accounts, and there’s a limit of 200. Sometimes I spot comments of friends I made like 20 years ago.