Articles: Digg the aftermath
One of my articles recently got presented on the front page of the news aggregation service digg.com this is my reactions.
Added: 2006-02-14 16:25:35 - Modified: 2006-02-15 21:57:44 - Level: Beginner
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Introduction
One of my articles recently got presented on the front page of the news aggregation service digg.com . The article in question is to be found at kfwebs.net but its content isn't the primary focus of this article. What is, however the primary focus is the effect being on the front-page of digg had. .
About Digg
URL: digg.com
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
About Slashdot
URL: slashdot.org
Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by OSTG, which, in turn is owned by VA Software.
Their bandwidth and co-loc comes from Exodus.Net, and our hardware comes from VA Linux Systems.
Slashdot typically serves 80 million pages per month. They serve around 3 million pages on weekdays, and slightly less on weekends.
About the article
The article was related to the “Get the Facts” campaign that Microsoft is running. It was broken down into four pages.
- Get the facts
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Reliability
- Security
- Intellectual Property Indemnification
- Performance
- Interoperability
- Partner Success
- Conclusion
- About the author
Traffic data
Visitors
I received approximately 15,000 unique visitors the first day after I reached the digg frontpage, of which 4,000 unique visitors visited the first hour. About 4,000 unique visitors is to be traced to digg the days following the front-page happening.
This graph was created by a trial version of the application Webtrends.
Operating systems used
| Windows | 67.9 % |
| Macintosh | 15.1 % |
| Linux | 13.5 % |
Windows was the most used operating system, clearly dominated by Windows XP followed by Windows 2000.
The Macintosh users were evenly distributed across Mac OS X and other versions of Mac OS. With a small victory for OS X.
15 percent of the GNU/Linux users used the distribution Ubuntu and 10% used Debian.
User Agents / Browsers used
| Firefox | 61.6 % |
| MS Internet Explorer | 16.2 % |
| Netscape | 7.1 % |
| Safari | 4.6 % |
| Opera | 4.3 % |
Firefox was by far the most used browser. 70 % of the requests originating from firefox used the latest version 1.5.0.1, while 14% used the 1.0.7 version and 11% used 1.5 (not updated to 1.5.0.1).
90 % of the Internet Explorer (IE) request originated from version 6. while 7% used the beta version of version 7.0.
What can be learned from being on Digg
Connection limits
It is better to admit it sooner than later. But yours truly messed up and 37 pages only showed “Cannot establish a connection to the MySQL server”. This wasn't a limitation in the server software, but with the administrator. The connection limit to MySQL had not been raised from the default value (100 connections) by the time the article hit the frontpage, and MySQL rejected more connections.
This was easily solved by raising the connection limit, but should not have been necessary, and brought with it some comments on digg. The maximum concurrent connections was 185.
Server system
The server handled the increased load magnificently, and the CPU idle time did not drop below 85%. The primary limitation is bandwidth.
Bandwidth
The header of the website kfwebs.net was 41.71 KiB. Simply changing the format from Portable Network Graphics (PNG) to Joint Picture Experts Group (JPEG) result in a 6.5 KiB file, but to get better contrast for the logo I ended up with a transparent GIF overlay to a JPEG background which is 8.2 KiB in size.
The header itself accounted for approximately 50% of the bandwidth usage. The total bandwidth usage was approximately 270 Megabytes the first hour on the frontpage.
Multiple pages
Users does not like multiple pages. Out of 22,000 pageviews on the first page, only 8,500 reached page two, 5,800 reached page 3 and 4,800 reached the final page.
Advertisement
Digg users doesn't seem to click on the advertisement. And the click-through-ratio is substantially lower than average.
Conclusion
I like both Digg and Slashdot, and considered it an honor to be visited by the Digg crowd.
Other stories about being on Digg and Slashdot
Related articles:
Get the facts - The real ones (Root)
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