Not all the gold that glitters ... or the mysterious "slashdot" effect

On this article, and I hope, on a series of future articles on this topic, I got a joke from a drunken mouth ineptly told, unfortunately, he didn’t cause a strong reaction from a cheerful company:
- Tell me, are there ghosts in this castle?
- Here, b ..! Everyone says like that! But I have not seen a single ghost, unfortunately, and have not seen! And I live here - neither more nor less, eight hundred years!
In our real life, there are quite a lot of inexplicable, mysterious and interesting phenomena, such as poltergeist, telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, UFOs and the like. The fact that all these phenomena are real and exist is a fact. But they are explained in different ways: either by the sick imagination of mankind, or by the hidden capabilities of our body, the secret developments of the special services, and sometimes quite simply - they said, it seemed to you.

Not one hundred scientists tried to deduce whole theories (sometimes even completely revolutionary) to explain such phenomena, even went so far as to explain the greater efficiency of the candlelight prayer (than without a candle) through the theory of coaxial fields! In general, whose truth here is not clear, but the existence of these phenomena somewhere deep in the soul is recognized by absolutely everyone, even the most inveterate conservatives.
The Internet is a world based on the laws of mathematics, logic and physics, and it would seem there can be no place for such phenomena in the virtual space. Ahhh, NO !!! It happens! And the human factor that plays a dominant role in the life of the network is to blame for everything.
In this article, and in the following series, I want to talk about the most famous and interesting "virtual poltergeists" that deserve special attention, study and elimination not at all virtual, but real experts. Let's start with the "slashdot" effect.
Every admin wants one day to make his site the most popular, most famous and most visited. And somewhere, in the depths of the subconscious, all admins dream that his brainchild is the most in demand in the internet, and they, having pleasantly settled in a cozy hammock, manage to email someone to sell and who do not have many billions of shares of their successful project. And imagine, it sometimes happens, and in a matter of minutes, site traffic increases 1,000 times, only the effect is the opposite: not sustaining such a huge “tension”, in just a few minutes the site “falls” ... Bring it to life after such a shock, it takes quite a long time, and then, attendance also abruptly goes to "no", and everything falls into place.
The so-called “slashdot” effect is one of the specific phenomena of the Internet, associated with a powerful surge in attendance of an ordinary website after a link to this resource appeared on the news feed of a popular online publication or blog. The term, and indeed the phenomenon appeared thanks to the popular information technology blog Slashdot, which used to be one of the most popular sites on the Web. It was then that this anomaly was first noticed, which often manifests itself in our days.
For the “slashdot” effect, it is characteristic that a huge influx of traffic is growing rapidly like a snowball, actually turning into a DoS attack, so that an unhappy site that has never experienced such an influx of visitors very quickly becomes inaccessible or access to it is difficult. for server congestion or insufficient bandwidth of communication channels. Such a situation is called “slashdot” -effect. The site, which has temporarily disappeared from the Network, is said to have “merited”. Earlier, when the Internet infrastructure was less developed, this phenomenon was encountered much more often, but now it can manifest itself in all its glory. For example, recently “slashdot” effect experienced the site www.al-ansar.biz , on which, according to rumors, a video of the execution of the American hostage Michael Berg in Iraq was published. The site became unavailable within an hour after its "merit".
“Slashdot” effect has such a destructive power due to the time factor. As soon as the link is published on the site, then many readers immediately follow it. Traffic can reach several hundred thousand hits per minute.
Large news and corporate websites are usually not affected by the “slashdot” effect, because they were originally designed to serve a large number of visitors. The victims are most often small sites on private hosting or sites that have posted popular multimedia content (music, movies). Such sites become unavailable within a few minutes after they are mentioned on the news feed.
Scientists have already begun to study the "slashdot" effect. In one study, the attendance rate of a server that was “reported” was documented. As you can see on the graph, within 15 minutes, traffic increased from 30 hits per minute to more than 250 hits per minute.
Here is another study of the effect.
Another great "slashdot" effect occurred in 2005. After it became known that Google was buying Picasa, traffic to the site of this small company grew by 6000%, that is, sixty-one !!! According to Hitwise, the Picasa website ranked July 16,300 in traffic on July 9, and on July 16, it jumped to 313rd place. In the “Photography” category, the Picasa site rose to the second place, having overtaken the portals of such giants as Kodak, Canon, and even by one day.
These amazing numbers give an idea of ​​how powerful the slashdot effect can be !!!
Abnormally high traffic is usually observed within 12–18 hours. Truly phenomenal traffic is usually observed only for a few tens of minutes or a few hours. However, there are exceptions when the “slashdot” effect manifests itself for a longer time.
Another “mystical mysteriousness” of the “slashdot” effect is that most of the news and materials causing an incredible surge in attendance did not stand out for anything special and were not sensational !!! That is, in this case, we can talk about a kind of mass psychosis of users, for not understandable reasons, rushing to this link, like bulls to red.
Slashdot effect has positive and negative sides. The influx of visitors has a positive effect on the popularity of the site, but a sharp increase in attendance is similar to a DoS attack. If the site has the infrastructure for organizing a community (forum, blog, newsgroup or chat), then registering a huge number of new users violates the internal organization of the community and causes vandalism and constant provocations.
The alternate name for the “slashdot” effect is the term “flash crowd” (the flash crowd), according to the same story by science fiction writer Larry Niven, in which he describes how instant teleportation allowed huge numbers of people to appear almost instantly anywhere in the world where an action takes place, worthy of attention. The crowd at the scene appeared immediately after the information about the event was published in the media.
But nowadays, scientists are more and more approaching the creation of systems for counteracting and canceling the “slashdot” effect. For example, special systems have been created that, at the slightest sign of this effect, copy the site entirely and take a hit upon themselves. And today, these systems are becoming increasingly popular and improving. So this “poltergeist” is slowly fading away ...
And as a conclusion, you can bring two old, but certainly time-tested sayings: “Shaw zadto, it is not good” and “Not all the gold that glitters” ... And if a ton of diamonds will ever fall on your head, then you probably already it will be absolutely all the same that it was diamonds that fell on you, even if you erected a monument to them ... And I am sure you would exchange this ton of jewels with great pleasure, half a kilo of poop, life is more expensive ...
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