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 the link becoming Farked. 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. Slashdot, often abbreviated as /.[1], is a science, science fiction, and technology-related news website owned by SourceForge, Inc. ... Rob Malda Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976), also known as CmdrTaco, is the founder of the website Slashdot. ... Jonathan Pater is an editor and co-founder[citation needed] of Slashdot. ... Anonymous Coward is a term applied within some online communities to describe users who post without a handle; it is a dummy name attributed to anonymous posts used by some weblogs that allow posting by people without registering for accounts. ... Slash (a backronym for Slashdot-Like Automated Storytelling Homepage) is the open source collection of Perl modules and stand-alone programs which runs Slashdot, one of the oldest and most popular collaborative weblogs in existence. ... Geeks in Space was a semi-weekly Internet audio show produced from June 1999 to June 2001. ... A website (alternatively, Web site or web site) is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that is hosted on one or several Web server(s), usually accessible via the Internet, cell phone or a LAN. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML... // Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. ... Slashdot, often abbreviated as /.[1], is a science, science fiction, and technology-related news website owned by SourceForge, Inc. ... Screenshot Fark. ... Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. ... -1... In information technology, a server is an application or device that performs services for connected clients as part of a client-server architecture. ... A disk quota is a limit set by a system administrator that restricts certain aspects of file system usage on modern operating systems. ... Shared hosting is a form of web hosting where more than one web site is hosted on the same server. ...

Links from other popular websites can cause problems comparable to this effect – see traffic overload. // Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. ...

Cause

Slashdot Effect

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 from readers can exceed the site's available bandwidth or the ability of its servers to respond, and render the site temporarily unreachable. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (1280x768, 67 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Slashdot effect ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (1280x768, 67 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Slashdot effect ... // A hyperlink (often referred to as simply link), is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document, another document, or a specified section of another document, that automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected by the...

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] A denial-of-service attack (also, DoS attack) is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system. ...

Extent

MRTG Graph from a web server statistics generator showing a moderate Slashdot effect in action.

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 readership. The Slashdot effect in action. ... The Slashdot effect in action. ... The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network links. ...

Sun Microsystems' Secure Global Desktop page after it was "Slashdotted".

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 the site'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 significantly longer lifetimes due to the popularity, newsworthiness, or interest in the linked article; an example is the case of an announcement of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 source code leaks.^[5] Image File history File links Sun_opendesktop. ... Image File history File links Sun_opendesktop. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... // Sun Microsystems acquired Tarantella, Inc. ...

Some have recently commented that the Slashdot effect has been diminishing. ^[6]

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 new users suddenly set up accounts and start 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 many of the unwanted aspects of Slashdot along with it, such as trolling, vandalism, and newbie-like behavior. A virtual community is a group whose members are connected by means of information technologies, typically the Internet. ... A Do not feed the troll image In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude, repetitive or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy or antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion, including... Vandalism is the conspicuous defacement or destruction of a structure, a symbol or anything else that goes against the will of the owner/governing body. ... “Newcomer” redirects here. ...

Assistance and prevention

Slashdot does not mirror the sites it links to on its own servers, 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. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Not to be confused with copywriting. ...

One tool commonly advocated to assist smaller sites in bearing the load of a Slashdot effect is the Coral P2P Web Cache. 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.^[7] Coral is an open source, peer-to-peer content distribution network designed to mirror web content. ...

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 a similar alternative for Digg users. Sites in the process of being Slashdotted may be able to mitigate the 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." The Mozilla Organization (mozilla. ... Bugzilla is a general-purpose bug-tracking tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla Foundation. ...

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. Backslash is a flash crowd avoidance protocol written by T Stading, P Maniatis, M Baker, D Hadaller - in IPTPS, 2002. ...

Companies in the network monitoring area have begun visually documenting what happens to a site's servers when a site is Slashdotted to assist IT staff in effectively upgrading the site. Some have begun experimenting with 3D visualizations.^[8] The term network monitoring describes the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing systems and that notifies the network administrator in case of outages via email, pager or other alarms. ...

Similar terms

Here, the site delivering the links is something other than Slashdot.

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. ... “Fark” redirects here. ... Kuro5hin (K5) (pronounced corrosion[1]) is a collaborative discussion website. ... Something Awful, sometimes abbreviated to SA, is a cynical comedy website based in the United States. ... MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a community weblog whose purpose is to share links and discuss interesting websites. ... Penny Arcade is a webcomic and blog written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. ... Instapundit is a very conservative political blog in the United States produced by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. ...

Notes and references

http://www.cilginim.com http://www.bilgisavar.com http://www.googleoyun.net http://www.thegregerentshow.com http://www.hemenyukle.us http://www.2satir.com http://www.highturk.com http://www.deparoto.com http://www.tirilbus.com

External links

• Slashdot
• Solution for Slashdot Effect? on Wired News
• Slashdot FAQ: What is the "Slashdot Effect?"
• The Slashdot Effect: An Analysis of Three Internet Publications, by Stephen Adler.
• People report their experiences of being Slashdotted, Farked, Dugg etc

Wired News, online at Wired. ...

Mirror Services

• Dugg Back
• Mirror Dot (has not been updated since approx. 20 Sept. 2007)
• Dugg Mirror
• Coral Cache
• dot cache (Site not available - 31 Oct. 2007)