Good BSD/Linux Article (somewhat off-topic)

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Colin Percival wrote:

> At 16:18 16/01/2004, Jamie Bowden wrote:
> >I read it from the link off of Daemon News' Daily section.  If someone
> >wants to /. it, you'll probably need to upgrade your connection for a few
> >days, and add filters to your mail to screen the nastygrams you'll be sure
> >to get from the shallow (and usually 14yo) end of the Linux Userbase Pool.
> 
>    I think the /. effect is overrated these days.  Network connections
> and processors have gotten faster much more rapidly than the slashdot
> readership has grown; the only time slashdot kills anything now is when
> people use excessively dynamic pages. 

My experience is much the same -- I've had various web sites I hosted
slashdotted on various occasions, and for a long time I hosted them on a
p120 on a small fraction of a T1 without any problem.  Of course, I don't
use dynamic content, and it seems like the people who really have the
problems are the people using a lot of CGI scripts with perl on their
front page :-).  I suspect that the /. effect has gotten easier to carry
over time in part because a lot of the clients are higher bandwidth than
they were before -- if you have moderate size files being tranfered, lots
of long-lived slow connections take up a lot more memory than short-lived
ones. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research