The Infamous "Slashdot" Effect

Another point on the curve

Everyone talks about this effect.... you hear about it all the time in computer geek camps, but you never think it will happen to you.

Then I get an email to my pager from a friend trying to be anonymous telling me they put my webpage on Slashdot. Yes, docanime, I know who you are and you will be properly thanked. Later.

Here's webalizer's plot for the month of January:

January's statistics for the Mars Scorecard: 44,844 hits.

Thanks, everyone. I'm honored you found it useful enough to visit and bookmark.

To give you some context, here's a little more data from 2004 Janurary: 
Power outage on Jan 10.
Major peak of 37763 hits on Jan 16,
minor peak of 12324 hits on the 30th.

Average number of hits per day BEFORE 1/16: 1982 +/-1225 (not including the 10th)
Average number of hits per day AFTER  1/16: 3798 +/- 893 (not including the 30th)
The "bounce" on the 30th was caused by another Slashdot reference.

Just to give you a baseline, the average number of hits PER DAY on all of www.bio.aps.anl.gov were:

2003 October: 3,043
2003 November:2,349
2003 December:2,360
2004 January: 4,266

The webserver during January was a little PII-450MHz. It seemd to have survived the onslaught on the 16th for two reasons:

  1. The page contains no pictures or animations, so it's relatively light.
  2. The page was not computer related.
God forbid I should put up a "flashy" popular page regarding, say, my experience with The OS used on the computers that went to Mars.

As a friend of mine said, "The gods love copper armor."