Well, that was quite an experience. PortableApps.com ended up on the homepage of both Slashdot and Digg at the same time. Needless to say, this shared-hosting-based Drupal site wasn't quite ready for all of that. I was able to get placeholders up within an hour or two and keep the pages disabled. The Support section was brought back online first. Then the Apps Directory. I've re-enabled the forums for now and am watching the server load. I may have to disable them again until we at least drop off the Slashdot homepage (4th from the bottom now).
Apologies for the server being so inaccessible today. The host had to disable it as it was causing severe load issues for all the other sites hosted on our shared 4-processor server. I'm investigating a dedicated server to alleviate these issues in the future.
Thanks for bearing with me!
John 
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I guess too much publicity is bad
p.s.- did you disable the personal info on purpose?
-Justin
I'm working with the throttling component in Drupal to dynamically disable certain functionality when too many users are hitting the site.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
just wanted to make sure it wasn't me
-Justin
What about the links to view your forum discussions, they are no longer there, will that be re-enabled?
-Justin
Extra features like that are automatically disabled when the site gets busy.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
The Slashdot and Digg effects will take a few days to fully calm down. The forums will occasionally be disabled and some pages on the site may be static cached versions at times to deal with the load. Thanks again for bearing with me.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I can understand why you need to do this.
-Justin
Out of interest how many hits did you getfrom Slashdot and Digg?
The problem with the Slashdot and Dugg effect is that it isn't just those sites. Once it hits their homepages, it winds up on a lot more blogs and other sites.
On Wednesday, when the stories both hit, I had 211,000 page views. The problem was a lot of them are concentrated around when the stories hit. At its height, the site was pushing over 1MBit/sec and spiking the CPU on the quad processor shared box its on. That's when the host had to disable it and people started getting 403 errors. I got it back up with a quick static page linking to the downloads at SourceForge (so people could at least get the apps) and then gradually brought individual pieces back online.
Even yesterday, the site was still experiencing issues. For most of the day, the Portable Firefox, Portable OO.o, homepage and a few of the App Directory pages were actually static versions rather than pulled from Drupal to reduce server load. (You can tell because there is no login or account block on the left) Plus the forums, search, profiles, tracker, app rating and stats were disabled within Drupal for much of the day as well to keep CPU usage down. The site pushed 278,000 page views yesterday but it wasn't as bad as they were more evenly spread throughout the day.
I may do a quick writeup on what happened and the full chain of events if anybody's interested.
Regards,
John
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Out of general curiosity, I would actually be quite interested in reading about what happened.
And me!!!
I suppose hitting a server limit is a thing to be congratulated
.
Rob Loach [Website] [Projects]
Do we really need this stickied anymore? This problem has long since passed...
Same goes for the "next steps, dedicated server soon" sticky post.
And THAT'S why everyone should be using the Coral Content Distribution Network.
Taking advantage of Coral CDN is simple. Just append
.nyud.net:8080
to the hostname of any URL, and your request for that URL is handled by Coral!
Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.
I learned about it from slashdot. Too bad most authors there fail to realize what teh slashdot effect does (or digg, or fark, or any other large community site that does news). Bah.
Oh, yeah. Why is this still a sticky?
And Mirrordot.
This shouldn't be a sticky, but it is.
----
R McCue
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."