I now know the power of Digg. Sadly, I had no chance to prepare.

I took an old article from this site from a few years ago and refactored it to be relevant to today’s world and posted it on Mac Geekery. A day later, the site cratered (taking CP and OBS with it). It briefly hit the Digg front page, and, briefly, Oberon was hit with enough requests that the kernel stopped passing them off to Apache.

So, there were some design flaws here, mostly mine. First, I’m on a VDS. That’s good and bad. Good in that I get control, bad in that I get so very little RAM and space to do what I need to do. I can’t run more than a dozen forks of Apache, so that limits the incoming requests and presents a slow server to the world when hammered. This is bad. It’s also bad because I can’t give MySQL enough cache memory so that it doesn’t have to hit the disk. This, too, is bad, since disk access is shared with other machines. Overall, running a “dugg” site on a VDS … bad.

Then the page it hit was in Drupal. That’s PHP code. And the page itself loaded about 20 media items. That’s 20 requests to Apache. Which can handle a dozen. Yay me. So I made the page a static page on the drive that just had the text and ads. The server came to life … slowly.

Over the course of the day I had to watch it and poke it a little to keep it going, but the worst appears over (watch Slashdot get it next).

The freaky part? I love this stuff.