[bombcar]

Reminds me of when Slashdot would go down, and all the slashdot-like sites would immediately fold under the excess traffic.

Same here, if reddit goes down, everyone goes to other time-wasters like HN and those begin to get overloaded.

[jedberg]

My very first job out of school included running sendmail.org. Rule number one was "make sure we can handle all of Slashdot's traffic".

[bombcar]

Ah, back when major sites would fail to a slashdotting and someone running freeBSD with a text-only site would survive just fine.

[jedberg]

> and someone running freeBSD with a text-only site would survive just fine.

Haha yep! That was our trick! FreeBSD FTW. That box ended up having an uptime over 1000 days before we had to power it down to move it.

[duckmysick]

> before we had to power it down to move it.

Reminds me of a story where someone had to move a server physically without downtime. The story is on Reddit, but if you really want to read it now there's an archived version. And there's a Hacker News thread too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/i3xbjb/rant_sorta...

https://web.archive.org/web/20221224195636/https://www.reddi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059243

[kloch]

That was definitely a thing back then. I've had sites slashdotted several times and never had any issues using FreeBSD and static-ish content and/or compiled C cgi's w/mysql. It also helped that I worked in networking and always had (sometimes just) enough bandwidth available.

Then there was that time in my Atari 800 was slashdotted. The Atari could serve several hits/s on it's 9600 baud interface but the 3com CS-210 terminal server would crash about every 6 hours. https://kl.net/atari/

Probably the most surprising (for it's time) hits/s I had to deal with was when Art Bell had my solar status monitor gif's inlined right on his homepage for a while in 1997-98. It was pretty wild when he would say on the air "Go to my website right now!"