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Digg Can Kill You With Generosity
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-02-01
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As the social media site Digg gains in membership, more people will try to hit links from its front page to a destination hosting a featured story. That could be bad.
 | | Digg Can Kill You With Generosity |  |
The integrity of the servers on the receiving end of a massive Digg may not be up to the challenge. A flood of incoming traffic could be sufficient to make a happy little Sun box go supernova, for example.
Social media driving a massive traffic spike is nothing new on the Internet. The kids may think they invented the server-as-smoking-crater Digg effect, but the Slashdot effect or being completely Farked predate the Digg phenomenon.
The monitoring service vendor Pingdom thinks Digg may end up harming itself with such enthusiastic users merrily hopping onto a web server by the thousands. "Digg can't keep using the same model they are now. It simply doesn't scale," argued Pingdom.
Their position is Digg will continue to flatten bigger and bigger sites as more and more Digg enthusiasts go from the Digg front page to whatever is at the top at the moment. We think this can be mitigated by an alert webmaster, who can edit the server configuration to send traffic referred from Digg to a static page, rather than one being served dynamically.
Humorously enough, Pingdom felt the wrath of the Digg effect when one of its blog posts hit the main page of Digg.com. "The dedicated server for this blog couldn't keep up with the initial burst of visitors from Digg. This is kind of ironic considering we're an uptime monitoring company," said Pingdom.
Security pros should be a little concerned about the impact of dealing with a Digg influx. If they have to restart a server, will all of the services that have been turned off by default stay off, for example? If configured properly, they should, but it would be a good idea to double-check these just in case something hasn't changed.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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