dzone.com: Digg for developers
If TheServerSide is Slashdot for Java developers, dzone is Digg for developers. My blog entry “Is JSF really that bad?” was “dzoned” a couple of days ago and it crashed under the added traffic (or comment spam that associated with the traffic, see below).
Here is the hourly traffic diagram of my site on that day. The site crashed briefly (1-2 hours) in the morning shortly after the story was picked up by news sites. Then it recovers, cannot handled the traffic and crashed soon after dzone referenced it.
Here is the dzone story that started it. My apologies to dzone readers who clicked on the story but only saw the server error!!
Actually, before that, I have never paid much attention to dzone. I know it is a social bookmarking site started by guys at JavaLobby. But that’s pretty much it. Now that I know it better, I start to use and enjoy it. 
BTW, the reason my site crashed was that my cheap hosting company only allows 25 concurrent PHP threads. (Yeah, the $5 for 20G storage deal does not look very good now!) Since I route all comments to Akismet to check for spam, the comment submitting PHP thread could potentially be long running. So, it could reach the 25 thread limit very soon if there are a couple comment spam robots working against me. I had to block some IP addresses to recover my site!
October 26th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Michael,
The problem with your site could easily be handled by using the WP-Cache plugin. I’ve written an article talking about it, but just installing the WP-Cache plugin would help dramatically.
http://www.johnnysthoughts.com/2006/09/17/handling-the-digg-effect-with-wordpress-caching/
October 26th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
That’s excellent. I will install it. Thank you!
October 26th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Done! It does feel much much faster now. Thanks!
October 26th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
You may want to follow the instructions in the article and set the cache time, etc, for maximum benefit.
Also, as a side note… get a new theme!
October 26th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Yeah, I enjoyed your blog. Thanks.
Re: new theme: I will get one when I have time!
October 26th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
That really is pathetic web hosting if they only allowed that much traffic through.
Sorry dude but you are by no means popular because you got “dzoned” and could not handle the traffic. However on the other hand, you might have been able to get your 15 seconds of Internet fame had you paid for some better hosting
Oh well, hopefully the wp-cache thing works out for you.
October 27th, 2006 at 12:01 am
Come on man, I did not say that I was “popular”! I would not have shown my measely 50 visits/hr traffic diagram if I wanted to be perceived “popular”!