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The Internet

Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"? 77

Posted by Cliff from the can-it-be-called-the-"slashdot-effect"-if-slashdot-isn't-involved dept.
mattsucks asks: "I was surfing Google News today, looking for something interesting. I had just loaded the page, and hit refresh. A new story popped up at the top of the news page, so I chased the link. 'Server Too Busy, Try Again Later' replied the kind webserver. Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended). Another example: one of our local talk-radio DJs likes to have his listeners pound the web sites of anyone he is peeved at. He's the #1 DJ in his slot, so when he says 'click' he generates a LOT of traffic. What other causes have people found of the Slashdot Effect?"
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Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"? More

Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"?

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  • Would you believe spam? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @01:26AM (#5840590) Homepage Journal
    If a spammer is foolish enough to host locally and advertise a URL, that's a good way to get yourself slashdotted - assuming people still bombard spamvertised websites with null requests.

  • memepool (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @01:26AM (#5840593) Homepage
    I've seen memepool [memepool.com] /. sites in the past...

  • Are you serious? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @01:26AM (#5840595) Homepage Journal
    Drudge
    Limbaugh
    Fark
    MSNBC
    Slate
    CNN
    Natural disasters
    National disasters
    etc.

    It seems like you're just coming up with questions for the sake of asking a question. That's the epitome of boring. Responding to such a question is only marginally less boring.

  • Fark (Score:5, Informative)

    by indyz ( 159873 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @01:27AM (#5840596) Homepage
    Fark [fark.com] drives a few servers into the ground every day.
  • you want a list of sources that could create a slashdot effect....

    and then you submit the website you hate to these site....

    A MASSIVE DDOS! :)

  • foreign language sites (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FrenZon ( 65408 ) * on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @01:40AM (#5840649) Homepage
    I run a site [bodytag.org] that has a lot of technical jiggery-pokery that people seem to like.

    About once a month or so, my daily hitrate goes up from around 10,000 per day to around 100,000*, as some foreign site discovers the site.

    It's only ever foreign sites, too - no English-language sites seem to generate that amount of hits. I suppose I have no way of knowing if I'm the butt of a thousand jokes on the sites that link me.

    Anyway, my point is that if you're looking for sources of the slashdot effect, don't forget to include foreign sites, as it's likely that foreign countries could conceivably have 'national portals', or whatever.

    * I presume this fits within the bounds of the /. effect, as I've seen slashdotted sites who've received less.

  • It's an emerging problem. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @02:09AM (#5840781)
    I've noticed that some of the big news sites (eg: abcnews.com / msnbc.com) often tend to avoid linking to sites that they mention in stories.

    I've been infuriated several times being unable to find a link to a site that they were talking about. I originally thought that perhaps it was because they were afraid they would loose page views if their readers discover those other sites.

    Now I'm not so sure. After seeing the number of sites that Slashdot destroys on a daily basis, someone much bigger (cnn.com, etc) could do much more damage than Slashdot ever could if they linked from a high-profile story to a small site.

    This poses an interesting problem. As people clump around the large popular sites, links between some sites will become one-way. That is, the smaller can link to the bigger, but not vice-versa. The web is no longer equal. At what point does this become a form of self-censorship with knowledge hosted on smaller sites unaccessable to the masses?
    • I think linking should always be done and if the server goes down then the visitor can come back later in the day. However with all of the legal junk larger sites are probably worried about the legality of linking to a site.

      Go calculate [webcalc.net] something

      • Except linking to a site is completely legal: see the w3c's article on that very subject. (Which I now can't find).

        It basically comes down to the fact that no one can have you arrested/sued/whatever for mentioning their company unless it was in a way that misrepresents them.
    • I was working at NCES [ed.gov] when Columbine happened, and CNN linked to our webpage, and our report on violence in schools. First thing I noticed was our T-1 was being maxed out. Our servers didn't shut down or anything, even though they were IIS 4. Our site was very sluggish for the next 24 hours until things started to get back to normal. I forget what our hits and page views stats where, but they increased by a factor of 5. The rest of that week our traffic was much higher than average.

      We got similar resul

    • I have seen news sites that give the URL, but not as a link. It won't slow down anyone who knows how to copy/paste, but probably smooths out the peaks quite a bit.
  • Penny-Arcade tends to crash webservers whenever they post something.
    • Interestingly enough, they have termed this "being wanged." As in: "Wow, that nifty website we just posted on the frontpage got wanged within fifteen minutes!". You can't make this stuff up, people.
  • Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended)
    Seriously, what pun? And how did this pap get past the editors?

  • Slashdot effect offline (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yrd ( 253300 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @03:25AM (#5841107) Homepage
    Britain's well-known celebrity chef Delia Smith is famous for causing 'offline' Slashdot effects by recommending each time she starts a TV series a select group of cooking hardware (pans, utensils etc.) and ingredients (a particular brand of sea salt, for example). These have a tendency to immediately start vanishing from shops (via the checkouts) at an astounding rate, which breeds newspaper stories about how fast they're selling which makes even more people want to buy them...
    • This is more like advertising, though whether or not Delia ever received benefits from those she plugs I don't know. A lot of people get offered free hardware (in this case utensils) in hopes that they'll give them popular reviews.

      If you want to compare this to slashdot, I guess we could call a good slashdotting a "successful" advertising campaign. No... we didn't nuke your server, we just advertised it reallllly well.
      • Well in some ways, getting your site featured on Slashdot is VERY good advertising... you usually get lots of hits if nothing else, so at least people get the chance to find out you exist.

        I don't know if Delia gets anything back for promoting these products, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens from time to time - although she is on the BBC, and I'm not entirely sure how their rules about interaction with commercial entities would apply for that.

  • SA (Score:5, Informative)

    by ctr2sprt ( 574731 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @04:08AM (#5841231)
    Something Awful [somethingawful.com] kills servers all the time. It was a game at one point: how long will the Geocities Awful Link of the Day last before getting throttled? I think the average time was about ten minutes, which is why they usually locally mirror the pictures and such they use for excerpts.

    SA has the added trick of mentioning if the page has a guestbook. All sorts of fun things to do with guestbooks, from ASCII-art renderings of goatse to, well, ASCII-art renderings of tubgirl.

  • It's widely reported that automated Windows Update downloads cause a sort of "reverse" Slashdot effect in which a significant portion of a location's bandwidth gets consumed up by the update process.
  • Kungfoo [kungfoo.com] probably gives the /. effect too
  • IMHO the /. effect is an unintentional DDOS, where there are many attempted connections to a web site simultaniously. The greatest instance of this that I can recall is the 9/11 attack, where all the online news services were flooded, BBC, CNN, ananova etc.

  • the email I get with those weird links in them...I click on them ALL the time. That must be generating some traffic.

    By the way...what is all this talk about Spam?

  • Geeks with excellent one-handed typing skills while some girl's webcam shows her getting it on with her boyfriend...

    "Refresh already, dammit!"

  • One of the first (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dschuetz ( 10924 ) * <davidNO@SPAMdasnet.org> on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @08:52AM (#5842081)
    I think one of the first slashdot effects was for a webserver in Purdue, with a professor's home page about lighting charcoal fires using liquid oxygen. It was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the server melted down quickly.

    I can't find a date, as his site has been changed to "The people in charge have requested this web site be removed. 2/6/2003 --ghg". Sad. It was really cool, with lots of pictures, movies, etc.

    Anyway, I think it was like '92 or '94 or somewhere around there.

  • The Dark Side (Score:3, Funny)

    by jaydho ( 98032 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @09:36AM (#5842391) Homepage
    Computer Geek: The Slashdot Effect is the sudden, relatively temporary surge in traffic to a Web site that occurs when a high-traffic Web site or other source posts a story that refers visitors to another Web site.

    Yoda: Pales it does to the Dark Side

    Yoda: Fear is the path of the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

    Computer Geek: But the slashdot effect is cool!

    Yoda: Zapht! [Yoda cuts Computer Geek in half with light saber.] Weak in the force was that one.

    Sig: Hot girls [jdhodges.com] and girls with alcohol [jdhodges.com] on my homepage.

  • Overwhelmed servers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by crmartin ( 98227 ) on Wednesday April 30, 2003 @10:59AM (#5843054)
    In a fair number of cases, it's stupidity that does it. Example: back when I worked for Sun, one of our customers was A Big Speciality Retailer (I'm a little limited here, but ABRS sells stuff that is big at Christmas for small humans, okay?) The CEO, P.H. Boss, had decided that a web presence was the Next Big Thing, so he'd hired a couple guys to build a web site, which they did in good ars Technica fashion, using tcl on a little bitty Sun server -- as I recall it was a single processor desktop box, like a 250. Connected to a DSL line, I believe.

    Mr. Boss thought this was such a great site that he went out and made a $50 million advertising buy, nationally, starting at Thanksgiving. What he didn't do was tell the technical people.

    The result was that everyone's mom left the Thanksgiving football games, logged on and tried to hit the server. Later measures suggested the server peaked at more than 1000 hits/sec. Needless to say, this served as a very effective smoke test, and sure enough the server smoked.

    Old P.H. was most disturbed with the technical people, with Sun, and with the whole web thing -- he couldn't understand why he couldn't spend $10K on a web site and $50 million on advertising and get perfect performance.
  • I visit the Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.Net on a daily basis. They have "TORNed" sites within 10 minutes of posting. They also post links to any LOTR related polls on other sites such as "favorite movie". LOTR wins every time after being linked.

    I am sure other "geeky" fan sites have the same effect.
  • Mercury Interactive sells a web server load testing tool called (wait for the pun...) "Load Runner". When we were in being wined and dined by the sales force before buying it, we were told this story (don't know if true or now, but it sound neat...)

    The IT team at CBS had worked for months to get their website up for "Survivor", with behind the scenes footage, bios of all the contestants, etc all set to debut with the first episode. a couple of days before the premier, some bright sales guy at MI called a

  • Being Canadian we up in the great white north have only limited knowledge of the Slashdot effect. Most of us not being use to AOL key words to access the internet, do not suffer from the Slashdot effect. There are a large group of lemmings which unfortunately is growing. They occasionaly create some website hangs, coming from the illiterate lemming communities at MSN and AOL Canada, fortunately there is as yet only very limited MSN and AOL Canada broad band access!
    As this changes and more keyboard challenge
  • I remember when the Howard Stern national radio show discovered someone, who happened to be hosted at my ISP at the time, discovered a realistic life size sex doll sold on the net. Did a whole show on it. 96-97?

    Caused a brief problem, which the ISP solved by moving the site to a dedicated Pentium Freebsd Apache box on its own port on the switch. 4 point something million hits that day.

    Wouldn't be much of a big deal, except that MS was running ads on TV boasting about their single server's ability to hand
  • At the job, we don't do time cards or anything like that. Our timekeeper Kronos is web based. So, you can guess what happens around 17:00. Then again around 18:00. And again, around 19:00

  • viri (Score:2, Insightful)

    by WickerChap ( 591994 )
    This has been done by a virus in the past - the browser homepage was set to a HTTP served file that was a trojan executable. The virus spread so quickly that it became a victim of its own success due to the servers hosting the file crashing.

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