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 comes from the huge influx of web traffic that often results from sites being mentioned on Slashdot, a popular technology news and information site. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – either their bandwidth is consumed or their servers fail to cope with the high number of requests.

Links from other popular websites can cause problems comparable to the Slashdot effect – see traffic overload.

1 Cause
2 Extent
- 2.1 Communities
3 Assistance and prevention
4 External links

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Cause

Slashdot consists of brief submitted articles and a self-moderated discussion on each story. In response to the stories, large masses of readers tend to simultaneously rush to view referenced sites. The ensuing flood of page requests, known as a slashdotting, often exceeds the ability of the site to respond in a timely manner, rendering the site slashdotted 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]

"Slashdotted" is sometimes abbreviated as "/.ed" in postings on the Slashdot site.

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Extent

Image:SlashdotEffectGraph.png Major news sites or corporate websites are typically unaffected by the Slashdot effect because they have been engineered to serve large numbers of requests. Websites that usually fall victim are generally smaller sites either hosted on home servers, with many large images or movie files or with inefficiently written 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 just a few minutes of an article's posting on Slashdot, 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.

Image:Sun opendesktop.png 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'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, certain things get bogged down for longer time. This all depends on the number of people posting, and for how long the story stays interesting. The marriage proposal of Slashdot founder Rob Malda [5] and the announcement of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 source code leaks [6] were a couple of the more active stories.

Some have recently commented that the Slashdot effect has been diminishing. [7]

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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 (see Slashdot trolling phenomena).

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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. Some also argue that asking for permission to link to another page is against the spirit of the World Wide Web.

One tool commonly advocated to assist smaller sites in bearing the load of a Slashdot effect is the Coral P2P Web Cache [8], 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. Suffering sites may be able to mitigate the Slashdot 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."

Protocols have been created (such as Backslash) that can help with this problem.

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