We been /.'d !
 

Airspirits article about his home grown rack cooling setup (as seen here ) was posted on Slashdot today. Resulting in a pretty massive beat down on the server.

The box isnt weak by any means, but it does have its limitations :) They managed to take down a P4 1.7Ghz box w/ 512mb ram like it was nothing. Caused some of the back end services to kinda fail resulting in queue lengths over 400 in some cases.

after a reboot (which took 1 hour for it to do), the server is back and kicking servicing something like 120 requests a second almost.

Edit:
(Heres a link to the Slashdot post)
After looking at about 8 different logs, I pin pointed the timing of events from thismorning. and I think I can honestly say there is absolutely nothing that connects the Slashdot event today to the server crash. Seems a site service I ran got a lil confused and thought to spawn a couple hundred copies of itself after it got stuck in a recovery loop of sorts.

doing some work to avoid this problem in the future (erroneous service freak outs)

Its good to be the king

Oh so THAT'S what was hammering at my back end

:)

What a POS comment, that did come off sounding like a blow job.

I noticed the downtime, but thought it was just my computer being weird again...

Great for the site!

Its quite amazing the damage caused by all that today... and the almost death of the server...

After looking at logs, the facts of what happened, I am more thinking this was not a load issue due to the machine unable to handle the web requests. it seems a certain DDOS was being used, or atleast attempted. I am sure some script kiddie /.'r thought it was funny.

anyway, the servers up, the forum has been cleaned ( had to repair the DB), and its handle'n 100 - 120 requests a second in MySQL without breaking a sweat.

Yeh the servers moving 10x the data now that it was most of the day, so I think this shows that the /. effect didnt take the site down, but it was the act of a service freaking out, or something...

noticed the downtime earlier, glad shes back up. I dont know what i would do! :(

So am I persona non grata now?

no way. Great job on getting such widespread notice of your project airspirit! Sorry the server buckled (for whatever reason).

So where you get that from?

The fact that something happened on the server shouldnt infer that you are "non grata".

But next time if you could give me some warning that would be nice... since I was out of town all yesterday, and if I knew this was coming I would have checked the server more often, and could have got it back online 6 hours earlier than I did.

Dont think that I or anyone is pissed, this is just how the web thing goes :) thanks for the linkage on /.!

Next time just let me know ahead of time :)

I sent you a PM early Saturday and it was posted Monday morning on Slashdot ... I thought you had enough warning. I was being sarcastic in my last post.

Well I kinda figured that if it was going to be posted it would have happened before monday. Since many many writings from PC have been sent their way and not posted in the past, I pretty much blew it off after sunday. It came as quite a shock Monday night :)

also the lack of a :D, :p, or :) in your original post sorta made it hard to tell if you were kidding, or not. Some people are moody and weird like that, so I sorta thought you were just upset or something.

It is how I keep you on your toes ... ROFLMAO.

Joe - Are you sure you didn't just take your server ice racing? ;)

LOL! I've been waiting for that to come up again ;)