

Ask HN: What's the new Slashdotting? - wpietri

Back in the olden dayes, the unit of flood demand was a Slashdotting [1]. If you wanted to make sure your site stayed up under a sudden flood of interest, you figured out what a Slashdotting looked like, simulated that, and you were probably good. Later my yardstick was "an Oprah". I had good data on what it looked like when Oprah mentioned your site on her show, so I would build for that. But that's getting a little dated.<p>So: what level of traffic do HNers simulate to test what a flood of public interest looks like?<p>Big bonus points for hard data from actual flash crowds.<p>[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdotting
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petervandijck
For us:

\- Yahoo homepage (for publishers more than for startups) (brief spike)

\- Tweeted by people with tons of followers (brief spike)

\- Google news (yes, still) (brief spike)

\- Viral on Facebook (tends to be more sustained)

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petenixey
I've seen first-place stories from HN drive up to 5 visits per second. I know
that Reddit goes higher but I've never had any traffic from there.

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logn
Anon DDOS, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNjdBSoIa8k>

(j/k :)

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kintamanimatt
A few years ago it was Digg, now it can be Reddit.

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lifeisstillgood
I think the idea it's now so hard to think of one means the way most people
online find out what's going on is no longer one portal - but a wide variety
of different portals, soon to become just a organic process of discovery with
weird sudden herd-like mentality (that might be a Dan Brown)

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zalew
reddit

