Nullamatix.com Survived The Digg Effect, Barely

Wow, what an interesting day. After experiencing The Digg Effect first hand, and looking over a few stats, I’ve made the conclusion that Digg users are comparable to a swarm of crack heads surfing the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, landing on the front page of Digg is awesome and I’m really grateful, but the swarm came, some saw, and then they left. That’s awesome. Like a swarm of locust coming to devour everything in site, and when they’re gone, all is quiet again. Literally 15 to 30 minutes of fame.

The User Comments - Wow

I always expected to receive massive amounts of comment spam whenever I feel victim to The Digg Effect, but the total opposite was the result. Several individuals left very insightful, well written comments. Thank you for the feedback and the thought provoking ideas. Now taking a look at the Digg page itself is another story. This is some hilarious stuff.

Ok, anyway, check out the Digg page if you’re really wanting to read all those. They’re really hilarious.

Additional, External Traffic - Surprising

There are several sites that scrape the Digg front page and I have no idea why. The content is duplicate, so nearly all of the sites I researched had zero pages indexed in Google, yet they continue to operate. Very unusual. Some of the other sites provided a very valuable service I suppose, such as netvibes.com, popurls.com, duggmirror.com, duggtrends.com, diggriver.com, stumbleupon.com, and a variety of other miscellaneous sites I never knew existed. At the end of the day I received traffic from over fifty new sites I’d never received traffic from, so landing on the front page of Digg provided even more traffic from additional, external sources. Yahoo is even reporting 840 backlinks today, which is a HUGE gain compared to the 241 backlinks the day before. Thanks for all the links!

Teh Server Needs Fixing - Exciting

The Digg Effect is exactly what was needed to optimize performance. The increased stress allowed me to tweek the settings to allow optimum performance without crashing. Initially, my buddy from FloridaCarAudio.com tried messaging me on GMail, but since I was sitting on my couch not paying attention to Digg or GMail, his warnings went unheard. Eventually he was kind enough to call me, which I’m really grateful for - thanks again C.

My putty session was terribly delayed, typing just one character took seconds to appear, and after trying to see how much memory was consumed, I received an error telling me there wasn’t enough memory to fulfill the command. Whoops! Nothing was working, ps auwx, memfree, free, ls, all required more memory than what was available. The server was showing 500 - Internal Server Error, but how can I fix the error if I can’t even maneuver through the server?! Finally, I ended up typing: killall php5-cgi, which did the trick. Reconfigured some of the options and restarted the http daemon. Within minutes the server was down, again, so I adjusted the php settings yet again, reducing the amount of resources the processes could consume.

If for some reason you’re unable to remember the name of a resource intensive program (like php5-cgi), or ps auwx just isn’t working, try listing the contents of /proc. That directory lists the PID (process ID) for running applications. From here you can start blindly killing processes. For example, kill -9 36558 will kill whichever process has that PID. It’s risky, but will eventually free up enough resources (memory) to regain control of your server.

With the server being continuously hammered, installing the much needed Wordpress Cache was extremely difficult, but worth it. With my pages cached, and php optimized, the server stayed up. At this time the article was half way down the Digg front page, so I’m eager to see how the server will perform the next time around :D.

Guilty Party - She Did It!

What’s really amusing to me is the fact that the article made popular wasn’t even my own. My wonderful sister is the one to blame - it was her submission! Her first time ever publishing an article on the Interwebs and it’s on the main page within a few hours - jeez. Thank you so much kat0wneded, you’re awesome. And for those of you who have a new favorite author, she’s in the process of writing another submission, so stay tuned, it’s going to rock your face.

The Digg Effect - Conclusion

The server went through a much needed optimization, Wordpress Cache was installed, miscellaneous traffic from scraper sites to myspace and facebook rocks, my buddy from Florida Car Audio pwns, my 18 year old sister writes better than you, and Adsense earned me $0.96. Ok, so the event wasn’t profitable, but that’s not what matters. The swarm of Digg crack heads was exciting, a rush even, and if you’ve yet to experience the Digg effect, make sure you’re prepared because I wasn’t.