slashdotted!

Several years ago (back when this machine was still a 486, actually), I put a global apache rewrite rule on the server to deny access to anyone who came here from slashdot. This was to avoid the so-called “slashdot effect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect.

Well, the rule has finally been triggered, thanks to “Extensible Programming for the 21st Century”:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/26/2231214 (A link to one of Greg’s articles).

Apparently denying the page was somewhat confusing, so I changed the rule to redirect to “this page”:http://www.cfrq.net/slashdot.html instead.

The server is holding up remarkably well under the load (much better than it did with comment spammers before I rate-limited the mt-comments.cgi scripts). Still, there is a lot of dynamic content here, and I don’t think Michelle wants the bandwidth headaches, so the rule stays.

posted at 9:19 pm on Wednesday, May 26, 2004 in Site News | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  1. joy says:
    2004-05-26 at 21:33

    You slashdot denying heathen! :-P

  2. Mark says:
    2004-05-27 at 21:08

    I read the article at http://www.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/xmlprog.html
    (my browser shows it was the link I visited) as refered by /. shortly after it was posted and did not notice any lag, /. effect or redirection.

    I thought it was hosted at UofT or HP.

    If it was hosted on your box then, good job! What sort of net connection do you have?

    Cheers

  3. Harald says:
    2004-05-27 at 22:18

    This site is currently redirecting automatically to the pyre.third-bit.com mirror (which is at UofT), but only for slashdot referers, so you might have read it here instead.

    As for our network connection, we are trying to use as little as possible of our generous host’s 3Mb/768Kb business-class DSL…

  4. Mark says:
    2004-05-28 at 20:03

    I was refered from slashdot, but due to a bug/feature of Galeon (as shipped with RH9.0) the referer field is not set when you open a new tab on a link.

    So http://www.third-bit.com served the page (your server survived). :)

    Here’s a test where pone.html was loaded by typing it into the address
    bar, ptwo.html was loaded via opening a new tab on a link from pone,
    and pthree was opened by clicking on a link from ptwo.

    Note referer is “-” except when it is set by the direct click loading of pthree.html.

    127.0.0.1 – – [28/May/2004:19:57:53 -0400] “GET /pone.html HTTP/1.1” 200 342 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131”
    127.0.0.1 – – [28/May/2004:19:57:57 -0400] “GET /ptwo.html HTTP/1.1” 200 346 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131”
    127.0.0.1 – – [28/May/2004:19:58:01 -0400] “GET /pthree.html HTTP/1.1” 200 342 “http://127.0.0.1/ptwo.html” “Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131”

    Cheers.

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