One Mans Blog
Specialization is for Insects.
Posted on Mar 27, 2007 - 8:18am by John P. in Site Updates
As I’ve said a few other times now… welcome visitors and new subscribers! Please note that the servers performance is quite erratic at the moment due to the fact that there have already been over 45,000 visitors in the last 8 hours.
This is the third time One Man’s Blog has hit the home page of Digg in the last month (everyone can thank Jimbeau for kicking it off this time. 
As I write this the How I’d Hack Your Passwords post has been Dugg nearly 1,700 times and is occupying the number 1 position on the Digg Technology page. Thanks to everyone that helped popularize this article!
For those of you that are new, please know that I’ve already purchased a massive new server to move the blog to… I’ve just not completed the migration yet because of a technical problem.
I promise to ratchet the urgency up a notch on getting moved to the new server, so please feel free to keep Digging, bookmarking and spreading the word in general and I’ll keep throwing more and more hardware at the site to handle however much load we can generate.
Thanks for everyone’s patience yet again!
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LOL, be afraid, be very afraid, for Digg cometh 4 u…
First - congratulations on the enormous number of Diggs!
Second - I think one of the first posts of yours that I read was about how to speed up a site in order to survive a good Digging. Did that stuff help this last time around, or are 1700 Diggs tough to survive no matter what you do?
Wuz - Yes, fear the Digg Reaper!
Eric,
Thanks for the congrats! This is actually the 3rd major Digging in the last few weeks. The article you reference followed my learnings from my first good thrashing.
On Feb 2, 2007 my 10 Worst Drivers Ever Caught on Video was Dugg over 800 times (currently 832) and it really rattled my nerves. I detailed the experience in the article you mentioned.
I then did all of the things that you read about and it actually did help when it came to round 2:
On Mar 6 the pounding began on Why Celebrity Photos Look So Great. This Dugg up to over 1500 (currently 1547). Despite receiving far more Diggs and traffic, the server handled the load surprisingly well. I used my trick of replacing the page in question with a static HTML document, and the remainder of the site seemed navigable for most of the time it was under seige.
This brings us to yesterday’s all out assault on How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords .
The intensity of this particular Digging far outpaced the previous two. Or that’s how it seemed to me at least. No amount of rebooting of the server, caching with WP Cache (I cranked the expiration times up to 100,000 seconds) or anything else would keep the dynamic pages serving. We simply had to wait for the article to get off the Top 10 list before things settled down a bit.
Even as I write this, the traffic continues to roll in and the article is currently up to over 2,500 Diggs.
So, the bottom line is, yes the things I did previously helped, but clearly I didn’t do enough. If I had installed a PHP caching program it might have helped a bit, but I think the main problem was that the database was overwhelmed.
Once I get migrated over to my new server I’m going to find a pro to optimize my database settings, install a PHP cache and generally make sure the server is doing all it can. I am also in the process of writing my own theme for the site from scratch which will eliminate as much extraneous load from the server as possible.
My goal is for the pages to load in 1/4 the time they are currently taking… that is, when they aren’t under attack!
Take care,
John
Yikes. Thanks for the details. I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that for a while.
The irony for me is: Web Urbanist has been Dugg a number of times recently, but because it still isn’t monetized really at all there is no way to even pay for upgraded hosting - so it’s all about caching and praying Dreamhost doesn’t throttle it
Well, when this site was going through all of that turmoil it wasn’t paying for it’s self either, but I’m fortunate enough to be able to support the cost just as a hobby.
Having said that I highly recommend you look into the More Money plugin. You can use it to selectively display ads to only search engine visitors - who are extremely fickle anyway and likely to leave the moment they arrive on your site. So you might as well give them some google ads to select from and make a few cents.
John