The Digg Effect

April 13th, 2007 Filed in: News & Updates Jump to comments

As you might have noticed that my site is loading very slow today and sometime not even available. This is because someone submitted my iTheme (WordPress theme) to Digg. The good news: I was dugg, but the news: my site was completely down last night for couple hours. If you were on my site last night, you probably had experienced the downtime. This is known as the "Digg effect". Digg effect is "the term given to the phenomenon of a popular website linking to a smaller site, causing the smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close due to the increased traffic."

Usually, my server (Media Temple’s dedicated server) is very stable which can manage my high traffic site (12,000+ visitors daily). But I was very disappointed that it couldn’t handle the Digg effect. As soon my link made to the Digg front page, my site immediately became very slow and sometime unavailable. This is cause by the high demand of server requests and database queries. There was nothing much I could do about it since my server’s CPU was at 100%. Well, I guess it is time to look for a better host or server upgrade.

The chart below shows that my site was down for about 6 hours:
webstats

Getting dugg is good because it brings you traffic and exposure, but it also has side effects such as server downtime and bandwidth excess. If you think you might get dugg next, be sure to prepare for it. Here are some links on how to handle the Digg effects:

P.S. I’m very excited to get dugg and thanks to all diggers who dugg my link. Also check out my previous dugg links:

Richard X. Thripp

# 39

June 25th, 2008 at 12:09 am

Wait, I thought the digg effect was when you get more visitors than normal? Isn’t the left half of the graph the digg effect?

It’s ironic that more exposure can bring you less visitors, because your server goes down. I second WP Super Cache; I’m using it on my Wordpress MU network, and it makes everything fast. At least the 2nd visitor and onward in a 24-hour period experiences the fastness. That’s all that matters when you have 1000 people visiting one page in the span of a few minutes, though.

I hope you’ve moved up to better hosting. Great design on the site.

ewanm89

# 38

March 17th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

cnet effect, I’ll think it was first caused by slashdot and is known as the slashdot effect. Of course slashdot is only usually for nerds, so it was where majority of the net were at one time.

parenting

# 37

February 8th, 2008 at 9:49 pm

nice effect, loads of traffic

mac

# 36

November 29th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

To avoid the “Digg effect” try implementing a page cache. This saves your server from the necessity of hitting your database for each request. http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ has a good version for wordpress.

Jason

# 35

August 16th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

great article

thanks

Rob

# 34

June 1st, 2007 at 7:20 am

The digg effect ?
Nice boost.
For the downtime: I think its more the Wordpress effect, i tried it out a while ago for a site with good traffic, no way to get that to work on the available shared host (regarding the “digg power” i assume that it can happen on your own server as well)

Solution would have been to render the files static, which i had to do with another CMS.