Posted on October 10th, 2005 by Kevin Dangoor

What’s a slashdotting like?

A Slashdotting can be very interesting if the thing most slashdotters are looking at is an 80MB file. I have no idea how many people (if any) were served up by the Coral cache. I don’t know how many people downloaded the file via BitTorrent.

I can see a thing or two by looking at my access log, and speaking with Jason I got some other fun facts.

About twice as many people viewed the 20 Minute Wiki screencast today as they did in the previous 23 days. It looks like over 13,500 now. The screencast was using an alarming 80-95Mbps for quite a bit of the day. Apache reports that TextDrive served up more than 1.2 terabytes for me today. Wow! Thanks, TextDrive!

As of now, my server at GoDaddy has served up another 67GB. Bob Ippolito has once again stepped up with capacity, this time on two different servers. Charlie Moad also provided a server. So, the load is now split up among four servers, which helps us all out I think.

As I write this, there are still quite a few people watching, so I’m guessing we’ll tack on another 1,000 views by morning.

Thanks to the folks who kept all of turbogears.org up and available for the whole day!

7 Responses to “What’s a slashdotting like?”

Ian Landsman on October 10th, 2005 11:33 pm:

You must be working full time just to coordinate getting all these servers up! This is great. I’ve always wondered what the actual value of a slashdotting is. I mean sure lots of people will know the name, but does it generate desirable results. In TurboGears case I imagine that would be things like people joining the mailing list, big wigs calling with job offers, etc. You’ll have to fill us in on if the slashing actually pushes TG forward.

Robert Kern on October 11th, 2005 12:28 am:

Now for the important question: how many Eggs got downloaded?

Michael Koziarski on October 11th, 2005 4:30 am:

What slashdotting!?

Told you we’d be fine ;)

tazzzzz on October 11th, 2005 9:23 am:

Ian:

The slashdot crowd certainly broadens the exposure of TurboGears, but is not quite as focused as the original TurboGears announcement… so, I’d expect a lower “conversion rate”, but the exposure is still well worth it.

The google group added about 40 new members yesterday, when 5-10 had been more typical of late. (There are now over 300 in the main google group, and more than 60 on the announcements group.)

Robert:

As of this morning, 4,200 more eggs served since yesterday.

Koz:

It’s a good thing I switched hosting companies!

Alexey Shamrin on October 12th, 2005 3:55 am:

> I have no idea how many people (if any) were served up by the Coral cache.

I tried to download video from http://www.turbogears.org.nyud.net:8090/docs/wiki20/20MinuteWiki.mov, but was redirected to one of the mirrors you have talked about.

The reason seems to be described here:
http://wiki.coralcdn.org/wiki.php/Main/FAQ#largefiles

Alexey Shamrin on October 12th, 2005 3:56 am:

So it seems to me that nobody was served by the Coral cache.
(Why can’t I edit or preview comments?)

eas on October 13th, 2005 12:20 am:

I had a similarly thrill last week when Harvey Danger’s free album download got mentioned on Slashdot and then Fark. We did about 1TB in 24 hours off of a Athlon XP server running Lighttpd. The 100Mbit connection was full for most of the day, but there was plenty of CPU and memory. Made me wish we had a fatter pipe. I think our torrent swarm did a similar volume in the same period.