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Slashdot effect

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The Slashdot effect is a particular example of how a popular website can cause a smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close after causing a great increase in the number of visitors going to the smaller site. The huge influx of traffic is a result of it 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 are unable to cope with the high strain.

Cause of the Slashdot effect

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."

Extent

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. Occasionally, paying slashdot subscribers have rendered a site unavailable even before the story is posted to the general userbase.

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, 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).

Gene Spafford's comments on Usenet seem particularly apposite to the chaos that can ensue when Slashdot readers descend upon an unsuspecting website: "like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."

Similar effects

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.

Slashdot does not mirror the sites it links to on its own servers nor does it endorse a third party solution. Slashdot, a commercial venture, makes its name by listing interesting web sites or news stories on its front page which are then consequently and routinely bombarded with more traffic than they were prepared for and, in some cases, more than they cared for.

The mirroring of content may constitute a breach of copyright, and in many cases, cause ad revenue to be lost for the site. The questionable legality of this practice is one of the primary reasons it has not been instituted. One may also argue that having to ask for permission to link to another page is against the spirit of the Internet.

The Jargon File states that the Slashdot effect is similar to the Flash Crowd described in the 1973 science fiction story by Larry Niven. In the novel cheap teleportation allows large numbers of people to gather almost instantaneously at the locations of newsworthy events around the world.

Assistance and prevention

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 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.

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.

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