Jump to content

Slashdot effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 69.142.163.215 (talk) at 00:25, 29 November 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Template:Slashdot The Slashdot effect is the huge influx of Internet traffic to a website as a result of its being mentioned on Slashdot, a popular technology news and information site. It can be generalized to refer to any time a popular website links to another one. 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 are unable to cope with the high strain.

This effect can also be applied to any number of other popular site-linking websites, notably Fark.com. Users there replace the term "Slashdot Effect" with the simplier term "farked". ("Farked after 21 clicks? God!")

Slashdot consists of submitted articles and a self-moderated discussion on each story. In response to the stories, large masses of readers 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. "Slashdotted" is sometimes abbreviated as "/.ed."

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 smaller sites hosted on home servers or those with many large images or movie files. These websites often become unavailable within just a few minutes of an article's posting on Slashdot, even before any comments have been posted.

Few definitive numbers[1][2] [3]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The flood usually peaks when the article is at the top of Slashdot's front page and gradually subsides as the story is superseded by newer items.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 [4] and the announcement of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 source code leaks [5] were a couple of the more active stories.

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).

The Slashdot effect is similar to a denial of service attack, in that both can cripple or eliminate access to websites. However, while a denial of service attack is a deliberate, malicious onslaught aimed at damaging computer systems and harming the victim's livelihood, the Slashdot effect is an unintended consequence of Slashdot's popularity that usually subsides fairly quickly.

The Jargon File states that an alternate term for Slashdot effect is "flash crowd", the title of a 1973 science fiction story by Larry Niven in which cheap teleportation allows large numbers of people to gather almost instantaneously at the locations of newsworthy events around the world. In the blogosphere, a similar term is "instalanche", the result of an item on the Instapundit weblog.

Presumably due to the Effect, the Mozilla Project's Bugzilla bugtracker blocks Slashdot from linking to it. Clicking a hyperlink on Slashdot to Bugzilla produces an error message.

The equivalent term in Germany is the so-called Heise effect (heisen, geheist).

One way to help out smaller sites when being slashdotted, is to use the Coral P2P Web Cache [6], designed at New York University. That will lower the amount of actual requests sent to the site drastically, thus decreasing the enormous load caused by hundreds and hundreds of slashdot readers visiting.

MirrorDot [7] is a system that automatically mirrors any Slashdot-linked pages and ensure the content would remain available, even if the original site got clobbered - trying to solve the Slashdot Effect.

Relevance to Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been "slashdotted" on:

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slashdot_effect&oldid=7950592"