Bandwidth

I remember a long time ago, I was slashdotted, and I was so excited! AT that time, I was getting maybe 125,000 hits a day max, and I was still sharing a virtual server with nineteen strangers, compartmented on one server. And I was slashdotted and the site ground to a halt, and it looked like 160,000 was the most people my server could handle! But why, what was the limiting factor? I researched the Apache configuration options, and found that I needed to increase the number of children per thread, or something of that nature. It perhaps wasn't bandwidth, as I thought at the time, (Eventually, as my traffic grew, a technician had to increase this Apache limit beyond its hard-wired limits, which involved tweaking a number and rebuilding. Anyway, I've longed for a repeat of the Slahsdotting, to see how high traffic would peak. And finally, after seven years, I was again slashdotted! With no impediments to traffic flow whatsoever, the daily peak was 1.7 million hits! And the midday hourly peak was gracefully handled, with much idle CPU time, and no reports of slow page loading. HURRAH!

Have I been Hacked in Russian?

I did a search on my server, and some strange code was inserted between the header and the body: 



о премии Чарльза Дарвина


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Darwin Awards

31 December 2006: /.


When I was slashdotted, I got 10x the usual weekend traffic, and the server
handled things just fine.  I noticed that there were 68,644 referrals, and
1,500,000 additional hits, so I speculate that each referred person saw 
20 pages.  This is probably on the high side.

To put into perspective how proud I am, that the server handled the load,
compare these two graphs.  The first is our website traffic during 2006.
The second is the year, plus a Slashdot spike.  10x the traffic still with
97% idle; 

top - 20:06:54 up 35 days,  5:48,  7 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.14, 0.12
Tasks: 161 total,   1 running, 156 sleeping,   4 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.0% us,  1.5% sy,  0.0% ni, 96.8% id,  0.2% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.5%
si
Mem:   1017744k total,   990852k used,    26892k free,    19960k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   505240k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                       
30451 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9180 S  0.7 24.0   0:00.02 httpd                         
30454 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9188 S  0.7 24.0   0:00.02 httpd                         
30460 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9184 S  0.7 24.0   0:00.02 httpd                         
30469 renee     16   0  2668  956  728 R  0.7  0.1   0:00.03 top                           
25238 renee     16   0  4264 1444  916 S  0.3  0.1   0:08.52 screen                        
30206 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9192 S  0.3 24.0   0:00.30 httpd                         
30232 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9196 S  0.3 24.0   0:00.30 httpd                         
30240 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9192 S  0.3 24.0   0:00.27 httpd                         
30453 apache    15   0  301m 238m 9180 S  0.3 24.0   0:00.01 httpd                         
    1 root      16   0  3264  416  352 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.97 init                          
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.56 migration/0