Anatomy of a Non-Slashdotting
The Slashdot story about my critique just dropped off the front page. My web server took a slashdotting with nary a whimper. Why? It’s only a single-processor Athlon with IDE disks on a 10MBps LAN – definitely not a studly machine.
I suspect four causes:
- The article 55k of text, so it’s lightweight. It’s not a Linux ISO.
- The story is static HTML. No Perl, PHP, or Python scripts are called to generate it. Had I still been running Plone, my server would probably be on its knees, begging for mercy.
- The story was posted during off hours (it was up from about 20:20 last night to about 13:46 today.)
- The material isn’t incredibly interesting. (It’s not the Matrix trailer, for instance). It racked up 299 comments as of this writing, which is low for Slashdot. But I’m not complaining. :)
In any event, answering the mail that came in was an entertaining way to avoid my COS 423 problem set – to which I now return.
The web server logs are analyzed here.