, 2 min read
Slashdot Effect on a Single Page
1. The post Hosting Static Content with GitLab was mentioned on Hacker News and this site experienced a heavy increase in accesses. Neither PHP, nor NGINX, nor the ISP experienced any problems. Nevertheless, I had never before seen such a stark rise in accesses to this website with real readers.
The Slashdot effect usually refers to the fact, when the web-server in question goes down, or is overloaded. In my case, the web-server could handle that all without any hickups.
2. Normally, I have roughly 1,000 monthly visitors to my blog. One can clearly spot the spike, where visits go up to more than 4,000. Below charts show:
- yearly visits
- monthly visits
- weekly visits
Above numbers are based on hefty filtering in the web-server log.
Below are the numbers, which I filter out of the access.log file from NGINX.
access.log had 3,101,246 lines.
| Filtering | number of suppressed lines | % |
|---|---|---|
| class B addresses | 1,527,803 | 49.3 |
| class C addresses | 136,109 | 4.4 |
| raw IP addresses | 32,566 | 1.1 |
| bots identifying as bots | 863,515 | 27.8 |
| empty user-agent | 0 | 0 |
| short user-agent (<=3) | 40,925 | 1.3 |
| no transmitted bytes | 280 | 0 |
| all lowercase user-agent | 8,581 | 0.3 |
| HTTP code | 182,837 | 5.9 |
But in July this jumped to almost 5,000 monthly visits. Initially I thought this is another bot just reading my blog.
One can clearly see that there is a spike, then a sharp decline, after the initial "hype" is over.
Above two graphs show the filtered results, i.e., filtering out bots, and other accesses, which are not "real" visitors.
3. Below graph shows the monthly 30,000 to 90,000 unfiltered visits to my web-server. One can clearly see the spike going up to 174,000 visits.
Below is the unfiltered statistics for the GitLab post:
Added 16-Aug-2024: I update my web-server on a regular basis.
This time I noticed that php-fpm recommended to change max_children parameter.
Below warning is way after the initial boom as described above.
Aug 02 16:20:20 ryzen php-fpm[958]: [WARNING] [pool www] server reached pm.max_children setting (20), consider raising it
Aug 02 16:20:22 ryzen sshd[979]: drop connection #0 from [170.64.236.223]:58996 on [192.168.0.20]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Aug 02 16:20:26 ryzen sshd[979]: drop connection #0 from [170.64.236.223]:36880 on [192.168.0.20]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Aug 02 16:20:26 ryzen php-fpm[958]: [WARNING] [pool www] server reached pm.max_children setting (20), consider raising it
Aug 02 16:20:29 ryzen sshd[979]: drop connection #0 from [170.64.236.223]:42996 on [192.168.0.20]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Aug 02 16:20:32 ryzen sshd[979]: drop connection #0 from [170.64.236.223]:49112 on [192.168.0.20]:22 penalty: failed authentication
Aug 02 16:20:35 ryzen php-fpm[958]: [WARNING] [pool www] server reached pm.max_children setting (20), consider raising it