Stardate 20021007.2130

(Ship's log): Since the modem swap last Friday, performance of my communication link has been flawless. Just to make sure, I've had my laptop running ping plotter the entire time since then, checking the traceroute time to a local server inside San Diego's RoadRunner system every ten seconds.

This is a plot of the data collected over the last 24 hours. See if you can figure out where on it Slashdot linked to one of my articles. (That's a toughie, isn't it?) In some ways, this was a rather fortuitous event; it was the kind of stress testing that was needed to show the resilience of the system. On a normal day right now the main page gets loaded between eight and nine thousand times. As I write this, it's nearly fifteen thousand and there's six hours to go before the counter resets. In addition, it looks like that article was directly loaded by slashdottees more than ten thousand times.

There's a package on my server written by Cobalt which says that the server handled four times as many "requests" today (more than 50,000) than it does on an ordinary day. (I have no idea what a "request" might be. It can't be a direct query to retrieve something, because each main page load involves about 20 queries most of which are for tiny graphics files.)

It's gratifying that neither the modem nor the server collapsed under the load. And now I know what it really feels like to be Slashdotted!