[Techtalk] The /. effect

[Diggy Bell]

Michelle,

Just a thought, but is there any way that you might be able to segment out
the portion of your site that contains the Slashdot-worthy content?  That
would give you a lot of options with regard to segmenting and throttling the
traffic if you hosted the Slashdot portion on a second machine.  It's a bit
of a brute force approach, but you could take advantage of redirects to go
so far as mirror that portion of your site at different locations.

The benefit here is that you have an option that will let you completely
segment the traffic 'just in case' you have a bandwidth problem or server
load.  If necessary, you can throttle that machine back to a limited number
of server processes without impacting the remainder of your site.  On the
downside, this all depends on the database contents.  If the data can be
'published' to a database to drive these pages, you should be able to easily
make everything work.  If the data can't be published, you'd have to
consider some sort of database synchronization which can get a little messy.
And again, if the bandwidth becomes the issue, you can push some of the
demand out to mirrored servers if you can find somebody to give you some
temporary space.

I know there are more elegant solutions, but I'm sittin' here with the old
flannel shirt on with the sleeves rolled up so this was a quick-n-dirty. ;)

William D. 'Diggy' Bell
Principal
DB Software Development
http://www.dbsoftdev.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michelle Murrain" <tech at murrain.net>
To: <techtalk at linuxchix.org>
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2002 6:39 PM
Subject: [Techtalk] The /. effect


> Heya chix,
>
> I am in need of advice. I host a website for an organization that I
> am a part of, and we are thinking that a particular thing we are
> doing is probably worthy of mention on Slashdot. The publicity would
> be great, and is needed.
>
> But as the host of this site, which also hosts many other sites, I'm
> wary of the /. effect. So:
>
> 1) Should I care?
> 2) If I should care, under what conditions should I worry about
> "crash and burn"
> 3) What can I do (like, would limiting the number of apache child
> processes, etc.) make a difference?
> 4) The site is database driven (perl/postgresql). Concerns there?
> 5) Bandwidth - the site has a fractional T1 running at 512K, is it
> possible everything else gets choked?
>
> Any ideas, advice, experiences in transiently high traffic situations
> is definitely welcome.
>
> Thanks!
> --
> .Michelle
>
> --------------------------
> Michelle Murrain, Technology Consulting
> tech at murrain.net     http://www.murrain.net
> 413-253-2874 ph
> 413-222-6350 cell
> 413-825-0288 fax
> AIM:pearlbear0 Y!:pearlbear9 ICQ:129250575
>
> "A vocation is where the world's hunger & your great gladness meet."
> Frederick Buechner
> _______________________________________________
> Techtalk mailing list
> Techtalk at linuxchix.org
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
>