Slashdot effect

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting or the hug of death occurs when a popular <a href="/facts/Website/SAsjJnca">website</a> links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This <a href="/facts/Web_traffic/vmR1QQDP">overloads</a> 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 <a href="/facts/Data_bandwidth/lY6Tb4gX">data bandwidth</a>, <a href="/facts/Server_(computing)/dEaYFD7r">servers</a> that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic <a href="/facts/Disk_quota/ld30QhUB">quotas</a>. Sites that are maintained on <a href="/facts/Shared_hosting/SjCpCStp">shared hosting</a> services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a <a href="/facts/Denial-of-service_attack/6nkoK02J">denial-of-service attack</a>, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of <a href="/facts/Web_traffic/vmR1QQDP">web traffic</a> which would result from the technology news site <a href="/facts/Slashdot/vVpMuby2">Slashdot</a> linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term.
The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from <a href="/facts/News_aggregator/nzy1zPes">similar sites</a>, and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms.

Slashdot effect open-in-new

Slashdot effect