June 8, 2004
Quite a start to the week...
Well, that was fun. Thanks to both the screaming about Firefox's theme, and the WHAT WG stuff we posted, we got hit by Slashdot twice in the last two days. The first one was much worse than the second, as it linked directly to a thread in the forums, which had already started to spiral out of control. It cause our bandwidth to go nuts, and we ended up pushing somewhere around 30 gigs on Sunday alone. The second hit was much easier to handle, as it linked only to our front page and front page talkback, both of which have been 'Slashdot-proofed' by Alex and myself.
As far as the forums go, this was our first big traffic spike since we reconfigured the servers post-firefox 0.8, and they seemed to hold up really well. While slow, the forums never actually crashed/stopped/died, other than when I took them offline to try and come up with a way to block Slashdot folks from hitting them directly. Because of a lack of mod_rewrite in our Apache install, we ended up just letting it happen, only turning off avatars and signatures in the forums to try and help ease the load.
On top of all of this, we expect an even bigger spike sometime this weekend, when Firefox 0.9 gets pushed out, and everyone and their mother comes looking for support. I'm still pretty worried that the forums are just going to go down entirely for that, so I'll be shutting off avatars and sigs again, along with possibly locking down some areas of the forum until the flood passes. I may also try and work up a lighter set of templates, maybe without images or something. I also plan to get mod_rewrite working in case Slashdot comes calling again...
Finally, I thought I'd mention once more James Cox, who helps me out when I screw up something, and has helped me with all aspects of the site. He really kicks ass, and we'd be dead in the water without him.
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