Addendum to The Slashdot Effect Internet Paper 101
Spock_NPA writes "An addendum to the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper is available here. It details the effect of Slashdot on the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper."
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Addendum to The Slashdot Effect Internet Paper
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The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
That dang Slsahdot effect... (Score:2)
Seriously, the white paper and the addendum are interesting looks into many abject statistics...bundled up and analyzed to make sense against the fact that "[insert Slashdot featured server name here]'s connection is crap" or that their machines can't handle the load. I shouldn't complain, my sites are run on a shared server that wouldn't dream of handling Slashdot-caliber traffic just for a single hosting client.
Interesting white paper, I enjoyed reading it.
Just how many people make up the Slashdot effect ? (Score:2)
How many registered people are there on Slashdot ?
How many unregisterered people use Slashdot ?
Maybe Slashdot ought to have a statistics page, showing the effect of the Slashdot effect on Slashdot!
What about the other side? (Score:3)
Re:That dang Slsahdot effect... (Score:1)
Seriously though, yes, I'd both love and hate to be
Ok, I must be tired... I'm rambling. If you want to
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The real question is... (Score:1)
Recursion (Score:1)
Seeing as being published on a regular basis seems to be the key to academic funding these days, it looks like someone has found something to keep their career moving.
addendum to the addendum? (Score:2)
"The Slashdot Effect as documented on the addendum documenting the Slashdot Effect on the original article on the Slashdot Effect."
Some
people
have
too
much
time
on
their
hands.
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:1)
Slashdot Top Ten (Score:3)
That would also be interesting to get an idea what load these servers have to deal with. I am not sure if the Slashdot Effect paper is really very representative.
Anndover.Net IPO (Score:1)
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:2)
Re:Recursion (Score:2)
Well we can't say when, but the addendum does address the question:
From the article (Score:3)
250 hits per minute. Now we know how big the slashdot effect is. Has anyone else seen surges this big (from 30/min to 250/min) from other sources other that /.?
Finding the referring site (Score:3)
It's easy to log the referrer in Apache. I do it using a combination of
If you're curious as to how this can be done under Apache, here's a rough description (apologies in advance for any ugly or careless code and any "Slashdot munging" in indentation, etc that may occur).
(1) Point people to a CGI script, not the direct page. If you want this file to end with
(2) Now here's the fun part. The script dumps the page to the requester then logs the interesting environment variables set by Apache.
Example script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
# Give them the page.
open(indexPage, "/path/to/real/content.html");
@fileStats = stat(indexPage);
$modifiedTime = gmtime($fileStats[9]);
$modifiedTime =~ s/^(...) (...) (\d\d?) (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d) (\d\d\d\d)/$1\, $3 $2 $5 $4 GMT/;
# first, print HTTP header
print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "Last-Modified: $modifiedTime\n";
print "Content-Length: $fileStats[7]\n";
print "Accept-Ranges: bytes\n\n";
# then, print body
while(){
}
close(indexPage);
# Now log the information.
$log="../khtmltest.log";
$localtime = `date`;
open(logFile, ">>$log");
print logFile "$localtime";
print logFile "$ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'} - $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}\n";
print logFile "\n";
close(logFile);
Cheers,
Navin.
I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:3)
The graphs had lines saying when it was posted on betanews,
Again, I may just be dribbling sh*t (or dajavu or something)
anyway.
Cyas
eek (Score:2)
Oh well, if you have trouble figuring it out, you can always email me and ask.
Re:Finding the referring site (Score:1)
Re:Finding the referring site (Score:1)
Re:Here are /. stats (Score:3)
uptime: 50 days, 21:18, 1 user,
load average: 0.49, 0.35, 0.24
processes: 132
yesterday: 76525
today: 1
ever: 203679322
These stats [slashdot.org] are shown in a 'slashbox' for registered users. A Custom Page [slashdot.org] that show these stats along with many other items.
What's missing from the /. stats is the average ratio between 'proccesses' and 'unique visits'. This number would prove valuable. Rob? are you reading this ? :)
Re:Finding the referring site (Score:3)
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
Re:Finding the referring site (Score:1)
Re:Recursion (Score:1)
Re:I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:2)
It's quite interesting that a paper that has a Last Modified header saying "Tuesday, February 16, 1999" suddenly appears on /. as "news". That's slightly scary.
Re:What about the other side? (Score:1)
Re:Finding the referring site (Score:1)
Well, here's one possible interpretation. It represents the most likely point at which people will receive e-mails from friends saying "I saw this great link on /.".
Re:This will get funded! :) (Score:2)
My name is Dr. Vinnyboombas and I seek funding for the following research:
Building a quantitative model of Postmodern Slashdot Societies effect on Cultural Imperialism and Statistical Geekology. and ummm oh yea..can I have a supercolider and a mindstorm kit?
Thank you Santa, I've been a good boy this year. :)
This has not been slashdotted. (Score:2)
Re:I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:2)
And I'll do a "me too" to the "me too".
I checked, and Slashdot search turns up this [slashdot.org] as part of some quickies.
Secondary surge explained (Score:2)
It's the time when the story hits the top of the "older stories" list.
Harald, counter.li.org [li.org] slashdot victim/beneficary
Re:From the article (Score:2)
Yet many of the stories we heard about the "Slashdot Effect" prior to this paper (and its addendum) spoke of servers being brought to their knees by the increased traffic- not something that seems likely at a meagre 4 hps.
This suggests that the paper only measured the magnitude of the effect for moderately popular articles- to gauge a 'Slashdottings' full potential for wreaking havoc, it would be useful to see the figures for truly popular articles (something like the annoucement of the original Mindcraft benchmarks, perhaps). My guess is that if the article is sufficiently interesting to pull in even 50% of the slashdot readership, the hit rate will go way over 4 hps.
jtjm - (anon. coward only while waiting for his password to arrive. Suspects it's stuck in a mailqueue somewhere between slashdot and his ISP.)
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:2)
A moderator, who has only five points to begin with, moderates your post to -1, using one of his points.
Because of _you_, another more deserving post doesn't get moderated up.
So even if it seems like it doesn't hurt someone...
it does.
Re:The real question is... (Score:1)
Re:From the article (Score:1)
It is, by the way, maazing to see how many hits you get merely submitting a story and including your homepage as a username link.. I hope my poor server at home is never "discovered" to carry anything cool (Unlikely, fortunately)... it'd go down in flames.
Re:Secondary surge explained (Score:2)
Re:/. effect ==packet loss (Score:2)
I would also posture a guess that at least 25% of the people experiencing the /. effect are indeed experiencing normal lag (packets dropped by routers a few hops away) combined with bad timing.
For example: Prime time (United state 7PM to 10PM) evening net use is 'spotty at best'.
helllooooo...over here (Score:1)
Re:What about the other side? (Score:1)
Maybe you could get honorary's for significant contributions to the advancement of the art. Like publishing the definitive guide to the MSWord
Re:I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:2)
~luge
Actually No... (Score:1)
Re:From the article (Score:2)
Normally processor power isn't a real issue if you have no perl scripts or other dynamic content. (perl needs about 12 seconds to load on my i486)
Bandwidth is much more critical at most server locations. (Yes, I know there are fibers out there
Re:Actually No... (Score:1)
Come on, that whole page could be summarized in a few words:
"Site's hitrates go up when news-sites advertise stories on said servers."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:Something weird about these stats. (Score:2)
Re:This will get funded! :) (Score:1)
Re:No need to code this, Apache can be configured (Score:1)
Re:From the article (Score:1)
On the other hand, an academic article like the three examples is only going to pick up the cream of slashdotters. I'd say that hitrate is at least quadrupled if you look at something that gets people more worked up, like Mindcraft.
Re:I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:3)
Might be worth coding up,
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:1)
We Europeans ( Well Swiss actually ) are reading and posting before EastCoast wakes up and the Aussies are doing it after you go to bed.
Try thinking Globally. The world does not start in New York and end in California.
Mroeder
Re:Something weird about these stats. (Score:1)
California, my ass! (Score:1)
Be warned, Continental United States snobs, you'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes!
(now where's that bottle of S'More Schnapps I was "sampling"?)
Re:From the article (Score:1)
Yeah, Cruel Site of the Day [cruel.com]. My Saga of Roter Hutmann [nothingisreal.com], which relates the story of a computer science nerd who falls in love with a Turing Test program, was nominated back in May. The resulting surge in hits nearly downed my ISP's server. To this day, including May in my domain's graphical statistics program introduces a spike so large that the rest of the months bottom out near 0.
Regards,
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:1)
(It had to be said)
Maybe we (America) have a monopoly on f1r5t p0st/warez lusers.
Re:Something weird about these stats. (Score:2)
On the other hand- as I've been checking, the "yesterday" figure keeps increasing. Probably the slashbox is just broken so that yesterday is today's stat and today points off into never never land somewhere.
of course not (Score:1)
hawk, esq., who refuses to wear those silly eastern ties stolen from 19th century british officers' uniforms
My server = 600 to 1000 hits/min (Score:1)
rodent...
Re:fr!st pS0t!!! (Score:3)
A lot of stuff on
Other things are the numerous "that's not worth posting" posts, which always strike me as really ironic, since someone is taking the trouble to comment on something that they say wasn't worth mentioning in the first place.
And then there are the obligatory "that's been mentioned before" posts.
And the "just got to work my political views in" posts, where people can't resist mentioning the moral status of [Bill_Clinton, George_Bush] (almost always in the subject line, since it doesn't do much good to hide inflammatory views down in the body of a post).
I'm sure there are more that I haven't noticed. Perhaps this would be a suitable topic for a companion paper, or at least a Guide to Slashdot.
All in all, I can imagine that this is really an entertaining site for those lurkers with a sense of humor about human nature.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Never underestimate the Freshmeat effect either (Score:1)
Thanks, scoop.
/* Steinar */
Re:/. effect ==packet loss (Score:1)
Slashdot math problem from hell
It's amazing though, not one mean hateful post in this whole conversation...
Re:First post epidemic (offtopic) (Score:1)
So encourage moderators not to waste points on this. It's not like they're doing God's work here or anything.
A school of thought on this would be that most people cruise slashdot at a -1 threshold or something at or above 1. What good does cruising at 0 give you anyway? If you want to see everything..you choose -1. If you want the filter..go at 1 or above. Since most "First Post" people post as AC, they get an automatic 0 to start out with, the -1'ers are going to see them regardless, and the filter people won't. Calling them Offtopic is just a waste.
Actually, any down moderation is a waste, people who don't want to see the crap are already cruising at +1 or more, thus filtering out all the 0 AC's. Why waste points to moderate them down further? Use the points to make the good posts more visible.
Re:What about the other side? (Score:2)
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
Re:Something weird about these stats. (Score:2)
I had always assumed it to be current users (or current instances of root). This conclusion came from the fact that the more other people posted (Hemos, Cliff, Robin, et al), the higher the number was...
'Course, I too, could be full of it...
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
Talk about self reference... (Score:1)
Re:addendum to the .sig addendum? (Score:2)
Teacher: "Is the bond covalent or ionic?"
Student1: "Isn't it ionic?"
Student2: "Don't you think?"
Even more offtopic (Score:1)
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Re:FIRST POST (Score:1)
Is this a record for latest first post claim? I mean, we're used to 2 or 3, but 73?
Oh well...
Greg
Money from /. effect. (Score:2)
Of course it probably won't work too well if you're trying to advertise MS Windows 2000
So how many hits are in a slashdot minute? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Even more offtopic (Score:1)
Exactly my point! People who believe all people are saying good things cruise at -1. People who just want to filter stuff out due to time, or whatever are cruising at 1 or above. Moderators are doing *nothing* good moderating things down. Moderation should be used solely to moderate up. If you feel the AC's at 0 may have something to say, you are also the type of person cruising at -1 already.
Re:From the article (Score:2)
It's a Pentium 225 w/ 128mb of ram (it was 200Mhz, with only 96mb of ram when I benched). On static and SSI pages, it would certainly flood the pipe (512 simultanious requests, total of 8192 or so in Ab). On phtml (PHP3 page), the load went up to 65 for a while (heheh)
Lesson to be learned: if you have dynamic content, have an Apache module to regenerate dynamic page X every N minutes. Serve up said generated page. This is what Slashdot does (IIRC), as well as other "serious" dynamic content sites (Yahoo patent comes to mind). I'm not sure if said module exists, but it'd be great if it did exist (instead of using cron scripts).
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Re:I'm sure I've seen that before (Score:2)
Actually, I'd disagree with that. If it hadn't been a slashdot-related article, I wouldn't have been sure whether I saw it on slashdot, LWN, or somewhere else.
When I've submitted stories, time differences mean that its generally just before the slashdot crew start going through their submissions in the morning. There are about 300-350 submissions, of which 5-10 are accepted. Noone can keep up with that, especially a story from February. Someone else might have posted that one, and, as part of quickies, it wouldn't have been as noticeable.
Slashdot Statistics (Score:2)
I propose that we launch a massive Slashdot statistics program. It would involve a significant amount of invasion of "privacy", i.e., almost every link off of /. would be logged, but we could get a lot of raw data to look at in interesting ways. Here are a few of my ideas:
There are more! Let someone else suggest them, though. I think that analyzing the raw data gained by these approaches would be a good statistics project for any upper high school or college student. And hey, I like Slashdot, and if I get credit for it, even better! (Well, it would be mostly raw data, not the real site, but still...)
Ken
PS - I would do such a project. Anybody who wouldn't?
Addendum (Score:1)
I just read somebody else's comment about click-through counters. Post any arguments about that as replys to that comment. (It's a reply to one of the top 5 posts, subject is descriptive. You find it.)
Ken
Re:Something weird about these stats. (Score:1)
Re:Actually No... (Score:1)
Douglas Hofstadter would enjoy this (Score:1)
If you haven't read Hofstadter's books "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Metamagical Themas" you should check them out.
This comment doesn't have an
Re:From the article (Score:1)
They don't. (Score:1)
Re:From the article (Score:1)
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip
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Re:From the article (Score:1)
I also run my K6-2 with a 75Mhz system bus and a 3.5 clock multiplier because my mobo doesn't natively support the 300Mhz speed the chip could do (and I'm not going to pus the mobo to 83Mhz bus speed). So it's a 262.5Mhz chip
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Re:From the article (Score:1)
Re:not just foriegners (Score:1)