25 Years Since the First Real 'Slashdot Effect' (slashdot.org) 31
reg writes: Twenty-five years ago today, CmdrTaco innocently posted a story entitled "Collection of Fun Video Clips" in the days of T1 lines and invited anyone with the bandwidth to check it out. Even though the term "Slashdot Effect" had already been coined, this was the first time it took down a site. The site owner got a personal call from their ISP, which was later reported in the comments, where he also noted that he was writing a novella called "She Hates My Futon." Many old timers started reading that, although it's never been finished, despite having a Good Reads page, a Facebook page, and several promises that he'll complete it.
What was the last site to be slashdotted? (Score:3)
Re:What was the last site to be slashdotted? (Score:5, Interesting)
A recent story (November 29, 2023) about BBC Basic killed the website in question.
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The site in this first slashdotting seems to be down again.
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Re: What was the last site to be slashdotted? (Score:2)
Has slashdot itself even been slash-dotted? As in linked to from an even bigger site that took it down?
Re: What was the last site to be slashdotted? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the main reason it's not even a thing anymore. Back then, there was basically fuck all you could do about DDoS, and burstable circuits basically weren't a thing so either you had a super expensive pipe to accommodate a large set of users at once (and paid dearly for it, even if you typically had few visitors most of the time) or you had something cheap like a T1.
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when /. was the at its heights, they did have many performance issues, but i don't really recall it ever being unreachable due to traffic related causes.
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Plenty have fallen to the Hacker News 'hug of death' (aka got slashdotted) this decade.
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The word "decade" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It used to be that "Plenty" had been Slashdotted in the past week, these days however you need to expand that time frame to a whole decade to justify the word plenty.
Slashdotting is largely a thing of the past. We're not hosting websites on our cable modems anymore.
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We're not hosting websites on our cable modems anymore.
Speak for yourself.
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At least that's how I remember it.
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I remember that as well! I wasn't reading Slashdot until about 2001, so it has to have been since then... but unfortunately I'm having no luck finding the story.
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Someone got slashdotted running a Sheva Plug or similar.
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given all the bandwidth ... what was the last site to be (reportedly) 'slashdotted'?
Do you mean brought down by traffic from a news story, or brought down by an actual Shashdot story? Because if you are asking about literal Slashdotting, then unfortunate truth is, that the increased bandwidth of modern sites isn't actually a factor for getting Slashdotted any more. Slashdot has (for a long long time) been looking in the rearview at having anywhere near the clout to even take down sites with early 2000's bandwidth with its current viewership.
The sad reality is that its current owners, lik
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The sad reality is that its current owners, like what they do with Sourceforge, are content to draft off the diminishing returns of once greatness and input literally no energy into the system.
Given the choice between /. as it exists versus the hypothetical statistically-certain-likelihood result of a large conglomerate inputting its energy into the system, I will gladly continue to suffer the archaic text encoding and mediocre mobile experience. I can get my Corporate Memphis/GloboHomo, Sticky Navigation, and Gigantic Mobile-Friendly Link Buttons fix elsewhere, thank you very much.
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It was not just bandwidth that was the problem. I worked for a company that had one its sites (dvdfile.com) /.'ed around 2002 or 2004. The bandwidth was fine and didn't come close to hitting their burstable 10mbs limit (normally load was under 1-2 mbs for all of their sites), but instead the web server melted down. I think Apache pushed the Linux server's load to over 80, which made it difficult even logging in via ssh and investigating. Maybe it was a Pentium 3-550 (we had a few of those, although they
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It's less about server bandwidth these days - popular sites generally are behind a CDN - Akamai, CloudFlare, etc., are all providing CDN and DDOS services for many websites.
Also, many sites are hosted on reasonably robust infrastructure - plenty are on AWS, Azure or other cloud provider. Almost no one is self-hosting th
I still have the whale.qt file I downloaded (Score:2)
My impression of the slashdot effect from the time was mostly irritation that even though I now had high-speed Internet access, I still had to wait for the site to recover (if it ever did).
My employer was slashdotted (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a company that reverse-engineered ICs and Slashdot posted a link to some micro-photographs of silicon art on their web site. (Those are whimsical little drawings sometimes hidden in spare corners of silicon chips.)
The web server was running IIS on NT4.0 or maybe even 3.5, and it keeled over. They hurriedly rebuilt it on Linux and that one managed to handle the load as the site was all static. (Don't know what the Internet connection's bandwidth was, but I suspect it became the limiting factor for the Linux box.)
This would have been around 1999-2000 or so.
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No less than two weeks ago I was trying to remember this exact site! I remember being one of those slashdotters hammering it (on an old account that's unfortunately a bit too Teenage to keep using, no matter how much cred that low six digit ID might impart). I don't suppose you remember the URL?
Nostalga (Score:1)
Wow, I totally got caught up reading that story back in the day, and every now and then I think about it and wonder if anything ever became of it. It's funny, in my memory it was titled "My Boot: She Hates My Futon", but I guess that was the name of the site it was on. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, and a working link to it!
It wasn't hard to DDoS a T1 (Score:3)
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You can edit Wikipedia.
rv. Please discuss your change on the Talk page NT (Score:2)
n/t
I was there....3000 years ago... (Score:2)
Ah the good ol days of Slashdotting a site. Those were fun and simpler times. Nowadays, you have to rent a botnet from some questionably hacks and hope it works.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Now somebody tell me how to get these cold, sticky grits outta my pants.
And get off my lawn!
I remember it being used as a threat... (Score:1)
When I was in college in the early 2000s, my roommate and I (both Comp Sci students) got in an argument over something stupid and he threatened to post a link to my personal website to Slashdot if he didn't get his way. We laughed about it later.
Jeez Louise. . . (Score:2)
That brings back a lot of memories. I remember wasting time at work reading She Hates My Futon. It was a fun read, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that it took place right here in good ole STL