Slashdot effect

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service attack, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term.^[1]

The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites,^[2] and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms.

^ Ari, Ismail; Hong, Bo; Miller, Ethan L.; Brandt, Scott A.; Long, Darrell D. E. (October 2003). "Managing Flash Crowds on the Internet" (PDF). University of California Santa Cruz Storage Systems Research Center. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 May 2013. Retrieved 15 March 2010.
^ Cite error: The named reference BW Less impact was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[1] Ari, Ismail; Hong, Bo; Miller, Ethan L.; Brandt, Scott A.; Long, Darrell D. E. (October 2003). "Managing Flash Crowds on the Internet" (PDF). University of California Santa Cruz Storage Systems Research Center. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 May 2013. Retrieved 15 March 2010.

[BW_Less_impact-2] Cite error: The named reference BW Less impact was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[1]

[2]