
The Slashdot Effect from the Other Side - CmdrTacoMalda
http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/09/the-slashdot-effect-from-the-other-side/
======
jedberg
I'm amazed he didn't have any data prior to this.

We used to ask people all the time if the would send us their sanitized logs
so we could see the "reddit effect", or at least give us the aggregate data.

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
I had some estimates, but this was the first time that I was ever 100%
completely on the outside looking in.

~~~
daviding
You two should set up a website. Allow voting on comments, or something.. :)

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ilamont
For a number of years, I worked for technology news sites. The Slashdot effect
frequently brought sites down, particularly in the earlier years when /.
seemed to have more influence (this was before HN, Stack Overflow, TC and a
number of other blogs) and load-balancing, cache and other elements were not
optimally configured on our end. Breaking news or particularly controversial
topics could bring upwards of 50,000 uniques/hour. This was a big deal for us.

Global news sites can experience far bigger surges when a major story breaks.
Around 10 years ago CNN started switching out its regular home page for a
version that stripped out video and most images when major stories broke. Not
sure if CDNs and better Internet video technologies have reduced the need for
this ...

~~~
zokier
"Around 10 years ago"

or in other words after 9/11 melted servers everywhere.

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dfranke
Did you create an HN account and submit this so that you could measure the HN
effect? :-)

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
I created the account yesterday simply to share the story that Slashdot
actually picked up. Then I emailed info@ here to try to get 'CmdrTaco' back.
It sucks that someone is squatting my nick here!

~~~
cmdrtaco
Sorry, was actually holding it for you since I saw you resign from slashdot.
Email the address in the profile and I'll turn it over to you.

~~~
ookware
Honourable cyber squatting? What is the world coming to?

------
blhack
I'm not sure how it compares to slashdot, but I _have_ had some of blogs on
thingist at the top of HN, reddit/r/programming, getting tweeted by lots of my
heros, on adafruit (which was really cool, since I really look up to Limor
Fried, a lot).

That is one of the _coolest_ feelings in the entire world for a little nerd
like myself. Usually

    
    
        tail -f /var/log/apache2/access log 
    

is running on one of my monitors all the time, so I can pretty much _watch_
visitors as they come into the site (I don't even see the code, I just see
blonde, brunette, redhead). When I've gotten that sort of traffic, I can't
make sense anymore. It's the difference between taking a drink from a
fountain, and sticking your face down a geyser.

Not only that, but to then watch your code stand up to the traffic is cool :).

Like a webdev version of your first kiss, I suppose :)

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ctdonath
It's a bit surreal. I once posted a picture on my petty little website, and
posted a single link somewhere. The link ended up on DrudgeReport.com. Soon
couldn't even FTP the site for some vital maintenance[1]. Had to call the ISP:

"Hello, Foobar ISP, can I help you?"

"Hi, I'm the reason your servers are melting down right now."

"Ah. Let me connect you to the company president..."

Told him the detailed story, he got a kick out of it, and deleted the
attracting file.

([1] - AP took issue with what I thought "fair use" of the Elian Gonzales
pictures the day they were published. No argument; I didn't expect concocting
them into an animated time-lapse sequence would get _that_ popular.)

------
rkalla
Is anyone else surprised the EC2 Micro did so well?

If you read the EC2 forums[1] for any amount of time you get used to seeing
post after post of "hung sites" running on the Micros when a constant level of
demand is made on them (not the intended usage model[2])

Under load the Micros frequently go into a catatonic state with %st ('top')
climbing to the moon as the VM environment provisions the brunt of the
server's resources to the other VMs on the machine and starves out any hungry
Micro instances (as designed).

I didn't think you could host anything on them with regularity. Maybe a swarm
of them behind an ELB, not not a single one... anyone else had the same
experience that Malda had?

[1] <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58323>

[2]
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/in...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/index.html?concepts_micro_instances.html)

~~~
moe
Last time I tried the micro's they were mostly starving on I/O. Quite possibly
his webserver wasn't doing much of that?

Also "tens of thousands" of requests is not really a big number anymore. Nginx
will happily serve a couple thousand per second even from a micro (until it
gets choked by the EC2 resource beancounting).

~~~
rkalla
moe that's a good point, if he's got all the pages statically cached and all
the graphical assets on S3, all nginx would need to do is serve back
relatively small TXT files which even on the micro would be trivial.

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utefan001
I understand that Amazon's S3 CDN is pay for what you use. If anyone here has
had a traffic spike using Amazon's CDN, what amount did you owe Mr. Bezos? I
would hate to have to tell my wife that we are buying groceries with the
credit card for a while because my little website was on slashdot.

~~~
sp332
You _can_ use the APIs to spin up more instances when traffic goes up (and
then close them down when you're not using them), but that doesn't happen
automatically. Other than that, bandwidth costs are very high at Amazon
compared most places, but it's still only $120/TB.
<https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>

~~~
pjscott
The question was about S3, which can be used to host static content. S3 has
the same data transfer prices as EC2, but you pay for storage and requests
instead of keeping instances running.

<https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/>

~~~
utefan001
Is this math correct? 400k of images, 1 million requests

400 * 1 million / 1024 / 1024 = 381.5 GB

381.5 * .14 = $53.41

------
sosuke
Welcome to Hacker News CmdrTaco, assuming it's you.

~~~
nightpool
I'm pretty sure he used a different account to reply to the comments here on
the story about him retiring, so it's probably not him.

~~~
e1ven
Looking at the original thread (
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2924731> ) I don't see anything like
that. Can you help me understand what comment you're referring to?

~~~
_delirium
He might be mixing him up with hemos, who did post in that thread (but is a
different person from cmdrtaco).

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
I created this account recently. I never posted during the original story that
got picked up here (although I did read the comments). And yes, it's me. But
you have no proof of that fact.

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burgerbrain
I find it interesting how I'm now reading cmdrtaco.net more than I'm reading
slashdot.

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drzaiusapelord
My ad blocking project was slashdotted years ago. I remember looking at the
apache logs in analog and going "Holy shit." Not only was the traffic huge but
it lasted a few days. I just assumed that it would die off at 5pm.

My cheap webhost managed to handle it pretty well. No issues. Then again it
was static HTML.

I just read taco's site. He doesn't mention what CMS he is using, but its
Wordpress. I wonder what cache plugin he's using. That's pretty important
stuff, just as important as what instance of EC2 he is using.

~~~
qx24b
W3 Total Cache, from his page source.

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jbm
I got slashdotted today (albeit by Slashdot Japan), and hit by Hacker News
yesterday.

I will put up some stats later, but HN brought in 10,000 hits, Slashdot
brought in about 600 people. I think the English vs. Japanese thing scared
away quite a few people (ironic considering the content of the article..)

(As an odd note, I did panic after hearing about Slashdot but not after seeing
people from HN - go figure)

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thenextcorner
In some verticals Slashdot can still bring more traffic than other tech sites.
It all depends on the topic, and how well the write up of the story is.

/. still relevant..!

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
It varies widely I imagine- you can see it on Slashdot very obviously: some
stories get 1k comments, others get 50. There is a HUGE variance in interest
on stories- and it's not always predictable. But when the planets align, I bet
the traffic generated could easily be low 6 figures to a single site, and that
would be over 3-6 hours.

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bestes
"Used to" for him/Slashdot would have been a loooong time ago.

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csytan
How does it compare to the HN effect? :)

~~~
CmdrTacoMalda
I'll probably write about that on monday!

