Slash Dotted

Many Web servers, when they have the fortune or misfortune of being SlashDotted, are brought to their knees by a deluge of nerdy browsers... God bless 'em.

SlashDot is a computer geek news site with a huge reader base, who check for new articles obsessively. Articles are usually a short summary with a link to another site. A new and interesting (or inflammatory) article can cause thousands if not tens of thousands of users to hit the linked site almost simultaneously.

In other words, it's a perfectly legal DistributedDenialOfService attack.

Unless hosted on a powerful server with lots of bandwidth, the site ends up being SlashDotted (ie unreachable due to bandwidth starvation from all the people clicking from SlashDot). This is called the SlashdotEffect. The phrase "slashdot effect" has even started to become used when SlashDot is not the "attacking" site.

The SlashdotEffect is especially hard on database-driven sites (where every page is created on-the-fly every time by e.g. a PHP script) and image-heavy sites (especially overly-designed sites with huge background images or text rendered as graphics). These kinds of bandwidth-unfriendly sites can go down within minutes of a SlashDot article appearing.

This may have happened the other day when MartinFowler's RefactoringBook was reviewed on SlashDot. Somebody mentioned ExtremeProgramming and had a link to the Wiki. It may be unrelated, but as I recall, I couldn't get to the Wiki all day. -- CurtisBartley

This happened to ZwiKi today. The load was not a problem but a Persistent Vandal showed up and caused trouble. I ended up freezing most of the site while I look into setting up some defenses like Wiki's robot blocking.

What's more, they thought they were linking here. Has WikiWikiWeb actually evaded the SlashDot radar all this time, or did it happen and we didn't notice? -- SimonMichael

Do a search. Two wiki story references; one to Twiki, one to you. Even the commentors usually get it wrong. Q: What is a wiki? A: http://www.wikiweb.com. Usually the links are to the ExtremeProgrammingRoadmap or something like that.

I really loved this quote from SlashDot: Hell, even after checking out the site thoroughly, I still can't figure out how wiki is different from allowing a zillion idiots to type on Windows NotePad. When I type something, it appears that anyone can just erase it or change it. What's the point? This is about as useless as setting up a copy of NotePad on a kiosk for people to use. All you can do is leave a message until the next guy changes it.

-- StephanHouben

The SlashDot article is not directly linked to this site, but it certainly wasn't hard to find indirectly. I had no idea that this site existed, although I'm quite impressed with the concept. All /.'ers are not "malicious" editors!

Ahem. Not all /.'ers are "malicious" editors (just as not all "malicious" editors are /.'ers).