Comments on: Can Your Site Survive a Digg?

By: FYI News: Dulles Technology Corridor Residents are Digg Diggin’ Slate’s Redesign « EverythingAshburn.COM loves Brambleton

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 06:14:36 +0000

[...] don’t try this Digg experiment at home before you read Monetize’s “Can Your Site Survive a Digg?” The piece predicts that the tidal wave of hits [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:47:11 +0000

Or, if you run Apache, you can prepare your site to automatically redirect visitors coming from Digg, Slashdot etc. to go through Coral Cache:
http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/1957

By: Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 04:39:39 +0000

I think Wordpress already has built-in caching, but maybe we need a plugin that can generate a static version of the site. Remember MT?

The build-in caching is disabled by default and isn’t a proper output cache… it’s just used for caching of frequently used PHP objects, like user, page, and category information. If you want to survive the Digg effect with WordPress, you need the WP-Cache2 plugin, which caches the HTML output of pages. I’ve pushed sites to well over 1200 page views per second with this, and other tweaks, using WordPress. Digg and Slashdot together at the same time aren’t even going to come close to hitting that.

By: Tetsou

Tetsou — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 17:51:34 +0000

This is great advice. I wished I had read it before I was dugg! I couldn’t survive being dugg at Tetsou when my article ‘ 7 deadly sins of email’ was posted. And this was the first of my articles to have been posted. Within hours I had floods of traffic hitting my page which is dynamically served by PHP.

As the server slowed, my provider notified me I was under a DOS attack! Ha ha. I explained about the Digg article and we tried to shore the server – but to no avail as my articel quickly hit the frontpage.

Be careful what you digg for.

Tetsou

By: Heath Weaver

Heath Weaver — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 14:39:32 +0000

Developing with RubyonRails allows you to set static comment as a feature of the framework. It’s as easy as specifying which parts of the page you want as static or dynamic.

Really interesting food for thought here.

By: jari

jari — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:29:39 +0000

These are nice tips. Found more related information on how to survive slashdotting, which might interest others.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:31:01 +0000

It would be nice to have pages written in HTML, however if you have thousands and millions of pages, it would be difficult to keep track of HTML pages, and especially if you require the template every now and then. Dynamic pages are, of course, the only way to go. Furthermore, I do not see Digg having much problem with dynamic pages.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:47:57 +0000

Great advices thanks!
looks like digg users love your site

By: Adam Knight

Adam Knight — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 04:18:39 +0000

what if your website requires dynamicly generated pages?

Then you use this tutorial instead. I've survived three FP diggs and kept the site dynamic the entire time with this method.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 03:30:53 +0000

>>what if your website requires dynamicly generated pages?

Usually all that will matter is the landing page. Make sure the traffic goes to a static page; having a home page that does not require database access would be generally beneficial for almost any site.

One way to do this is to write out datafiles to the web server every few minutes or when certain things update. So when someone makes a new post or creates a new profile, the DB writes out a datafile into the file system (ie, by serializing an array of items). The web server uses that datafile to pullinfo to the home page so that the database server is not needed. This sort of data delay is common and lets your home page get hit incessantly without causing undue load.