Slashdot effect
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The Slashdot effect is the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from the technology news site Slashdot linking to underpowered websites. However, it has been used to describe the same effect when generated by other websites or metablogs such as Fark and Digg, leading to terms such as the Digg effect or Fark effect. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect.
Links from other popular websites can cause problems comparable to this effect – see traffic overload.
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[edit] Cause
Sites such as Slashdot, Digg, and Fark consist of brief submitted stories and a self-moderated discussion on each story. The typical submission introduces a news item or website of interest by linking to it. In response, large masses of readers tend to simultaneously rush to view the referenced sites. The ensuing flood of page requests, known as a slashdotting or digging, or farking, often exceeds the ability of the site to respond in a timely manner, rendering the site slashdotted (or dugg or farked) and, for many visitors, unavailable for a time, occasionally exceeding the site's bandwidth limitations or causing servers to slow down. A comment in a Slashdot story summarized the effect: "Slashdot is world famous. A roving random distributed denial of service attack before which web, network and systems administrators alike quake and have terrible nightmares about."[1]
[edit] Extent
Major news sites or corporate websites are typically engineered to serve large numbers of requests and therefore do not normally exhibit this effect. Websites that fall victim may be hosted on home servers, offer large images or movie files or have inefficiently generated dynamic content (e.g. many database hits for every web hit even if all web hits are requesting the same page). These websites often become unavailable within a few minutes of a story's appearance, even before any comments have been posted. Occasionally, paying Slashdot subscribers (who have access to stories before non-paying users) have rendered a site unavailable even before the story is posted for the general userbase.
Few definitive numbers[2][3][4] exist regarding the precise magnitude of the Slashdot effect, but estimates put the peak of the mass influx of page requests at anywhere from several hundred to several thousand hits per minute. The flood usually peaks when the article is at the top of Slashdot/Digg's front page and gradually subsides as the story is superseded by newer items. Traffic usually remains at elevated levels until the article is pushed off the front page, which can take from 12 to 18 hours after its initial posting. However, some articles have a longer lifetime, as in the case of an announcement of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 source code leaks.[5]
Some have recently commented that the Slashdot effect has been diminishing. [6]
[edit] Communities
When the targeted website has a community-based structure, the term can also refer to the secondary effect of having a large group of users suddenly setting up accounts and starting to participate in the community. While in some cases this has been considered a good thing, in others it is viewed with disdain by the prior members, as quite often the sheer number of new people brings a lot of the unwanted aspects of Slashdot along with it, such as incessant trolling, vandalism, and newbie-like behavior.
[edit] Assistance and prevention
Slashdot does not mirror on its own servers the sites it links to, nor does it endorse a third party solution. Mirroring of content may constitute a breach of copyright and, in many cases, cause ad revenue to be lost for the targeted site. The questionable legality of the practice is one of the primary reasons that Slashdot has not implemented mirroring.
One tool commonly advocated to assist smaller sites in bearing the load of a Slashdot effect is the Coral P2P Web Cache, designed at New York University. The Coral caching system does not rewrite embedded links to pages or images, so is useful only for sites using relative links to images or other pages. Additionally, Coral will only serve content from the original site up to 24 hours after it becomes unreachable.
MirrorDot and Network Mirror are systems that automatically mirror any Slashdot-linked pages to ensure that the content remains available even if the original site becomes unresponsive. DuggMirror is another alternative amongst Digg users. Suffering sites may be able to mitigate the Slashdot/Digg effect by temporarily redirecting requests for the targeted pages to one of these mirrors.
After repeated incidents in which Mozilla's Bugzilla bugtracker was taken down when Slashdot linked directly to bug entries, Bugzilla started blocking links from Slashdot. Clicking a hyperlink on Slashdot to Bugzilla now produces the error message "Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled."
For this and perhaps other reasons, some argue that asking for permission to link to another page is against the spirit of the World Wide Web.[citation needed]
Protocols have been created (such as Backslash) that can help with this problem.
[edit] Similar terms
Here, the site delivering the links is something other than Slashdot.
- Digg effect or Dugg: the same effect referred to by users of Digg.
- Farked or Fbxrd: the same effect referred to by users of Fark.com.
- Goon Rush: the same effect referred to by users of SomethingAwful.com.
- MeFried: the same effect referred to by users of MetaFilter.
- Wanged: the same effect when caused by the webcomic Penny Arcade.
- /b/locked: same effect caused by users of 4chan.
- qwantzed: same effect when sent by Dinosaur Comics
