What is the “Slashdot Effect?
The Slashdot Effect is a sudden temporary uptick in traffic to a small website which is generated by a link from a larger website. The effect is named for a popular website called Slashdot, where users can submit stories of interest to share with other users. For a small website, the Slashdot Effect can overwhelm the server, temporarily taking the site offline. When a website gets Slashdotted, it can potentially have over 1,000 hits per minute in the first few hours, which can be a drastic change for a site which only got around 1,000 hits per day prior to the link on Slashdot. Within a few hours, the Slashdot Effect will usually start to taper off, as the story moves down the front page, and within a day or so, hits will drop dramatically as the story is removed from the front page entirely. Sites which have larger numbers of audio, video, or image files can quickly be overwhelmed by traffic from a major site as these files eat up bandwidth every time they are loaded. Inefficiently de
When Slashdot links a site, often a lot of readers will hit the link to read the story or see the purty pictures. This can easily throw thousands of hits at the site in minutes. Most of the time, large professional websites have no problem with this, but often a site we link will be a smaller site, used to getting only a few thousand hits a day. When all those Slashdot readers start crashing the party, it can saturate the site completely, causing the site to buckle under the strain. When this happens, the site is said to be “Slashdotted.” Recently, the terms “Slashdot Effect” and “Slashdotted” have been used more generally to refer to any short-term traffic jam at a website. We could conceivably cache pages, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.
According to Wikipedia, the term derives from the popular Slashdot website, which provides excerpts of material and posts links to the sites from which the material is pulled. Based on that, slashdotting could have just as easily been called “drudging,” insofar as the Drudge Report as been the cause of precipitous increases in traffic to other web sites.
Hi new visitor! At Green & White we discuss startups, business models, new media marketing, usability and more. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe for email alerts so that you keep up to date with the latest content. Now, on with the regular content… A valuable reader asks in response to the previous post: What about the fark effect or slashdot effect ? Are all of these same or different .. And how system admins handle these kinds of effects ? Well, I’ll try to add my two cents here. Everyone is welcome to add their own insights to this (esp from Sys Admin side). Trekker: How would you suggest handling any traffic Netscape creates for sites? The Fark effect or Slashdot effect I think is similar in nature to being highlighted by any major newspaper or journalist — if your product gets on the New York Times or CNN or something, you are bound to get a spike in traffic. Maybe the iRecord people can share some actual stats from this since they were recently highlighted. In a v
