[A]narchy is order, whereas government is civil war. »» Anselme Bellegarrigue

A Minor Digg Effect

Posted on July 21, 2007
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Apparently I struck a nerve over at Digg.com with my post a few days back about military personnel donating heavily to Dr. Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. I went to bed Thursday night pleased that I had written something that almost 50 people had enjoyed enough to digg. I awoke Friday morning to discover another 750 had joined them! As of this writing it’s been Dugg 1302 times and buried a good 50 or so if the comments at Digg are to be believed. I very briefly hit the Digg home page and spent a solid 24 hours flipping between the first and second page of their World & Business section. That’s by far the most ‘instant traffic’ this blog has received, so I was a bit concerned about the Digg effect (formerly known as the Slashdot effect). For those who aren’t familiar with the term, here’s a couple of graphs to show you exactly what happens when a story hits on Digg-

Unique Visitors Chart

The above shows the number of unique visitors to Philaahzophy for each day on July.

Philaahzophy Page Views for July

The above shows the number of daily page views for Philaahzophy in July.

As you can see, Digg provided a HUGE spike of traffic, quadrupling the number of page views and providing more than eight times the number of unique visitors. Luckily I chose wisely when I chose 1and1.com as my hosting provider. Despite my hosting several other sites, most with much higher traffic than Philaahzophy, on the same shared account, 1and1 didn’t bat an eye at handling this sudden surge. 24 hours later I haven’t received a single report of any noticeable slowdowns on any of my sites and the error logs actually show less activity than they normally do.

Of course, I realize that this was only a relatively minor Digg effect, but it was still a great test. The piece of mind in knowing that my sites are on a solid server makes sleeping a little bit easier. Now, I just need to figure out what to write in order to break the 3000 digg level