How Slashdot girds its servers

Commander Taco, one of ths Slashdot founders, describes the lengths to which /. has gone to ensure that wartime traffic-surges don't trash its servers. Reminds me of Web Site Optimization, which looks like a pretty good book on the finer points of this subject.

In preperation for more wartime coverage, we've made a few changes. One was to remove the Next/Prev links from article.pl. Those are relatively expensive DB calls, and when more users view articles, those 2 queries per article.pl add up. Someday we'll optimize them better, but they are actually quite tricky to do properly since next/prev are relative to the user. Any number of things affect them (Subscribers see stories in the future for example).

We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2. Logged in users won't be affected, and ACs can always drop it if they want, but this means they'll be more likely to see better comments, and hopefully smaller pages and fewer clicks.

Another change we're considering is the commentsplits. Currently we split pages on 100 comments. We're considering dropping that number to 50 or something. The theory is that more-but-smaller pages will result in snappier performance overall for everyone.

Of course the obvious answer is more metal. We're also trying to see if we can't scrounge up more boxes for the comments pool. If we get a 30-40% boost in traffic, it would be nice to have at least a 10-20% increase in hardware powering it.

Link Discuss (via Kottke)