| 2003: http://www.geology.smu.edu/~dpa-www/attention_span. 22 Requests / second was a big deal. Perhaps the best benchmark for the maximum potential traffic of the community at that time comes from a Slashdot post by Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) on September 14, 2001 (https://news.slashdot.org/story/01/09/13/154222/handling-the...), detailing the site's traffic following the 9/11 attacks. This load on Slashdot itself represents the full attention of the userbase and was higher than the site normally experienced: Normal Load: 18–20 dynamic page views per second. Peak Load: 60–70 page views per second. Daily Volume: 3 million page views (up from a daily average of 1.4 million). To handle this higher load, Slashdot itself had to disable dynamic content and serve static HTML to survive this load. Their database could not handle the query volume. A typical "Slashdotting" pushed 5 to 10 Mbps of traffic. Since many sites were hosted on T1 lines (1.5 Mbps), the pipe was instantly clogged, resulting in 100% packet loss for legitimate users. I remember when Slashdot broke because they used an Unsigned Mediumint counter for a primary key and finally overflowed it with 16 million comments over the life of the site on Nov 6, 2006. It was a different time back then when we still measured our installed RAM in megabytes. |