Slashdot Effect on 2004 Halloween Decorations and Webcam
I once again put out my halloween decorations in 2004 which ended up getting pounded as numerous web
sites picked up on it, including Slashdot, which is the incredibly popular
"News for Nerds" site and can bring a thundering herd of
surfers to your site, all in a very short amount of time.
I've written about the slashdot effect
before (I was /.'ed in Christmas 2002 & 2003), and wondered how it compared
to FARK, which is another heavily
trafficked site ... wellll ... for Halloween/2004, I found out! ;-)
The Web Server (a 2.4 GHz Xeon with a GByte of RAM running pretty standard
Linux with the Apache web server)
generates copious logging data and one can use the raw data to "track" traffic from
sites that link to you based on what is called the referrer (which spammers
sometimes spoof for referrer log spamming) - I actually use
this to do a customized body alert="message" from certain sites, so some folks
were amazed I "knew" about it so soon! ;-)
It's actually quite easy to see when these sites posted about the Halloween
stuff because there is a very noticeable uptick in traffic - all times are
Mountain Day Light Time (GMT-6) and the numbers below are definately
LOW because some browsers block the referrer.
- Slashdot
is the "News for Nerds" sites that has short articles with links for more info.
Their front page article was titled "X10 Hallowe'en Display" and had a single link to the Halloween Webcam that was posted at 1739 (and 7 seconds!) on Sunday, October 17th. Slashdot posts a dozen or so stories to the main page, so this
story slowly scrolled down. There was 151 comments in the article - a couple
from me. Note that "controversial" postings may generate more comments so
this suggests that /. traffic can certainly be higher for those sites.
- Ernie's House of WhoopAss is blog-like page (with links to mature content) from (surprise!) Ernie and
in an article posted at 1104 (and 30 seconds!) on Thursday, October 21st about
the Boston Red Sox, he mentioned it as a subtle "power out of his slump" link. There are "pay-for" forums, so I don't know if there
was discussion about this at his site. Ernie posts a new story about
once a day (or every other day) ... so this slowly gets pushed down to the
bottom. While the traffic isn't as "flashy" as Slashdot or FARK, he must have
one heck of a readership because it was a "buried" link and people kept coming
from his site to the Halloween Webcam - one wonders if he put up a "dedicated"
link saying "go check out these boobies" what the traffic would be like! ;-)
As can be seen from the stats, traffic from kept coming from here,
so Ernie has some serious staying power!
- FARK is the Drew Curtis web site that is a collection of user-submitted links (he picks out the "best" ones)
and the link clearly highlighed the webcam with an "annoy your neighbors"
comment (appropriate) and
was posted at 1148 (and 15 seconds!) on Friday, October 15th. Since Drew posts
a couple of dozen links a day, this get pushed lower and lower on the page,
but as can be seen, there is quite a bit of "flash" traffic generated,
although I suspect less than one of their "Boobies" links which tends to
gets lot of comments - this one had 76 "words-of-wisdom" and I chimed in on
it too. BTW, he tracks number of click-thru's, and as I write this on
November 4th, it it showing 17,039 which correllates well with my data below.
- MajorGeeks.Com is a web site
that probably doesn't need much explanation! ;-) They put it on their
main page under "Off Base Postings" at 1359 on Monday, October 25th with
some discussion in their Forums. It rolled off a day or two later, but
then they put it back up there through Halloween. Doesn't generate
flash traffic, but it is a pretty decent steady stream, plus I appreciated
having my site recognized by the MajorGeeks guys ... as did my wife! ;-)
- USA TODAY listed it as one of their "Hot Sites" in their
Web Guide. This was posted at 1216 on Thursday, October 28th and they
provided a direct link with an explanation. It appears this "rolled off"
of the "Hot Site" and into the October 28th archives just before noon
the next day. There is no opportunity for web surfers
to comment on the posting that I'm aware of. I never heard if it made
the Print Edition, but that would be hard to track.
BTW, honorable mention goes to Kim Komando which picked it as their Kool Site on
Friday, October 29th, 2004 and emailed her listeners ... but since there is
no referrer, this is hard to track, but it was a bit of traffic ... plus
she took my call on Saturday and we chatted briefly
on the radio. And another honorable mention to the Earthcam folks as it
was listed as one
of their Spooky Webcams which also generated a constant
stream of traffic. The the various search engines generated
a bit of inbound traffic as did these
funny guys from the Inquirer.
Number of inbounds per site after being posted
Site - Time Posted |
5 Min |
10 Min |
1 Hour |
2 Hours |
4 Hours |
8 Hours |
24 Hours |
2 Days |
Week |
Site - Time Posted |
Slashdot - 1739 |
691 |
1,528 |
8,335 |
15,645 |
29,102 |
42,698 |
67,656 |
68,894 |
69,397 |
Slashdot - 1739 |
Ernie - 1104 |
47 |
104 |
674 |
1,224 |
2,446 |
4,701 |
8,842 |
12,892 |
19,164 |
Ernie - 1104 |
FARK - 1148 |
531 |
1,133 |
5,251 |
7,979 |
10,716 |
12,904 |
15,451 |
16,384 |
16,900 |
FARK - 1148 |
MajorGeeks - 1359 |
6 |
17 |
78 |
146 |
276 |
385 |
822 |
1,443 |
3,361 |
MajorGeeks - 1359 |
USA Today - 1216 |
4 |
9 |
75 |
175 |
274 |
395 |
838 |
868 |
924 |
USA Today - 1216 |
Some General "Slashdot Effect" Commentary
While numerous folks have written about the Slashdot Effect, this was a little
different in that not only was it a test of "digital" stuff like the
web server, ISP bandwidth, Perl/CGI code, but also "analog" stuff as the
code has interfaces to various sensors and the webcam itself, plus you are
turning a lotta lights ON & OFF - it certainly provided one heck of a
light show for the neighbors! ;-)
It should be noted that the "digital" stuff has extensive logging (as did the
the webcam daemon)
but "analog" stuff does not. So I don't "know" if something goes wrong (for instance,
sometimes the images
just come back "bad")
and you have to infer problems/breakdowns due to heavy load indirectly.
Plus real-world analog stuff just isn't that fast, nor as "reliable", so I had
coded things intentionally with a 1-second throttle with the hope that the
analog side would not get overloaded - Fark "burned out" an X10 super socket,
but I never did pop a circuit breaker!
The webcam page is about 20 KBytes of HTML/CSS and the webcam image
varies between 10-20 KBytes ... so from a bandwidth point of view, it's
a pretty lightweight page - hey, I designed it so even dial-up'ers can use it!
While I missed the first hour or so of the Slashdotting (the most intense time),
the server itself was fairly responsive to interactive ssh sessions and
you can read more in the play-by-play that night.
However, the web server was pretty sluggish ... and what "hurts" is that
the webcam code is several thousand lines of Perl code (plus it slurps
in the Perl Modules Benchmark (I shoulda pulled it for production),
CGI::Carp, Fcntl, IPfree, Socket, and Time::HiRes) ... and I am
NOT using mod_perl (one of these days!) ... so that's a lotta startup work
for the web server/perl interpreter ... and then it runs my code ...
which actually gets done fairly quickly - it uses signals to communicate
with the "webcam daemon", so there's a sleep loop where it waits, but
that isn't CPU intensive. I also have a flag to disable real-time DNS
lookups and I probably should have set that, as those can take time.
Slashdot Effect Analysis - Misc. Interesting Tidbits/Ideas/Lessons Learned
The 2004 optimization of the X10, Webcam, and other "analog" devices worked well.
In 2003, I had a 5-second throttle, but I looked closely at the various
operations/commands and multi-threaded it as much as possible.
One easy "trick" was that the weather data is actually from the previous
query (it doesn't change that fast), so I just grab that data and queue
up a re-request for the next person. If the webcam (this year's
non-disclosure model is much quicker) is overloaded when
handling someone else (signals are blocked during this time), I just
grab the previous picture and say sorry, charlie. Similar optimizations
were done for the other sensors, but again, these are all farmed off in
parrellel rather than doing sequentially. In order to cycle the lights
on & off faster than one/second, I'll have to use a different technology
than X10 since it is relatively slow. BTW, several folks have asked when
I'm going to stream video and I'll consider that when someone pays for
an OC-3 line to my house and my web server at the ISP! ;-)
Which is "stronger" - Slashdot or Fark?
Slashdot SMASHES Fark (as The Incredible HULK would say) ... no doubt about that. And the interesting thing
that popped up from all this was Ernie is a serious player! ;-)
Insights into the Slashdot subscription program.
While Slashdot is a "free" web site, you can pay for a subscription
which also allows you to see stories earlier - i.e. beat the crowd and
see into the "mysterious future" as they call it. The
first referral was at 1719:24 (67.101.217.186 ), and there was
a total of 68 inbound referrals from 47 unique IP's until it hit the
publically viewable page at 1739:07 and the
thundering herd showed up! ;-) Ironically,
the Slashdot
subscription FAQ says about 10-20 minutes early ... this
was (basically) exactly 20 minutes.
Insights into the Fark subscription program - Total Fark.
Fark also offers a premium "pay" service which among other things, allows you
to see ALL submittals, not just those that are approved. The first referral
from TotalFark was at 1035:56 (12.14.172.51) and there were a total
of 134 inbounds from 122 unique IP's until it hit the main page at 1148:15.
I don't know if that is "fast" or "slow" in terms of getting approved;
but I would not be surprised if discussion among TotalFark'ers has
some bearing on if Drew approves a story (?)
How many FARK/Slashdot/Ernie/etc. readers are there?
The number of unique IP's was 70-80% of the numbers above (surprisingly
consistant) which is a ballpark figure for number of readers - yea, I know
there are proxy, DHCP, etc. issues. As mentioned, it's hard to say how popular
the halloween webcam is for the referring web sites readers, so that
certainly influences the numbers. It should be repeated again that Ernie
"buried" the link in an article about baseball whereas the others clearly
talked about what it was.
Alek had Google Adsense running - did I "clean up" from all the Slashdot traffic?
Nobody asked me this year, but last year, one person asked me if I made a
much money from the Google Adsense ads that are on the site. Unfortunately,
the Terms of Service do not allow
you to disclose (basically) ANY information. But you are only paid
on click-thru's, not ad impressions. So while the
later went up by (a LOT!), the click-thru percentage (no surprise) plummented
... and halloween lights/decorations/etc. aren't exactly high-value keywords!
So lets just say that thanx to Slashdot in Christmas/2003 last year,
the net "dollar delta" allowed me to take my wife out to a not-very fancy
dinner, but probably not a movie. And thanx to ALL of the web sites above,
this year, we went to a nicer place, ordered dessert, and caught that movie.
Adsense is a cool program (those Google guys are smart), and while
I'm sure others are making lotsa money with it, I do it to basically
just pay the ISP bills and just general playing around.
For the coders out there - be sure to think about and handle race conditions - they DO happen!
If you have never dealt with race conditions, The Slashdot Effect
is certainly a good test of your code. A classic (but flawed)
approach to file locking is checking to see if a file exists, and if not,
creating it ... but that is not an atomic operation - i.e. it's two different
steps seperated by a small amount of time - read more in my
Christmas 2003 Slashdot Effect writeup.
So I was using Perl Cookbook recipe 7.11 for file locking ... and
there was a total of 683 times that the non-blocking attempt to lock
the file failed ... so I would sleep a random amount of time from 0.1-0.2
seconds, and try 4 more times ... and even after all that, there were a total
of 5 times when it failed to acquire a lock.
The counters blew up one time, but I think that was a coding boo-boo on
my part and I uncovered a few other corner cases - it was good that FARK
hit me before Slashdot because the later is just a punishing test!
Would it be possible to get "early notification" of an incoming Slashdot?
I don't log/track the referrer in real-time with the CGI Perl script,
but this would not be difficult to add ... and then it's simply a matter
of looking for the incoming "slashdot.org/" (main page) ... but as noted above,
this would only give me 20 minutes notice. For Fark, you would look for
incoming "totalfark.com" which would signal that it has been submitted,
but I don't think there's any early indicator of when it has been approved
except they all show up at once. Note that if I tracked this, it would be
fairly easy to get/display "rate" information - i.e. 1,528 /.'ers in the
last 10 minutes.
Is Alek ready for Christmas/2004?
Wellllll ... you are never truly "ready" for Slashdot ... but I did
"tighten" up the code a bit so it should handle things better. Should
be the same 2.4 GHz Xeon ... and still no mod_perl.
I haven't decided how many lights to put out for Christmas yet - I did
22,000 (which was almost 80 amps) in 2002 which is considerably more than the
3,700 lights (and 15 amps) that were out for Halloween, so I could be dimming
the neighbors lights a bit!
Be sure to come by and check it out in December/2004 - here is the
main christmas lights page
and/or you can just jump to the
christmas webcam!
Want more info and/or have a suggestion/idea for me?
The Christmas FAQ has some
more info as does my responses when folks
Email Santa. And if
those don't answer your questions and/or if you have an idea (or just
want to send me an atta-boy), then
send me an Email.
Go back to the main slashdot effect analysis page.