Neil's News

Slashdotting

24 July 2004

My living depends on the Digital Routes server. Keeping it secure, online and responsive is aparently my purpose in life. So there's nothing quite like the pure terror of watching the load average inexorably climb from 0.02 to 39.48 as 53,000 people hit it en mass. Although the server remained up with only a barely noticeable slowdown, it was starting to snowball towards a crash only minutes away. Fortunately the wave peaked and things started to cool down. This has been a valuable experience; next time I'll be ready to switch Apache to a high-performance/low-feature configuration.

Keeping the server online is the easy part. The time-consuming part is sorting through the inevitable deluge of requests for more information, interview requests, publication offers, etc. It is insidiously easy to slip from doing cool stuff to just talking about cool stuff. I made that mistake once before. I won't repeat it.

Update: In unrelated news, Slashdot are running another story I submitted. This time the comments aren't too interesting. Hmm, Michael rewrote my rather skeptical title to make it sound more sensational.

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