Many websites often give a brief synopsis of a story and work as springboards offering a link to another website which carries the whole story. Interested readers click on the link leading to them to the referenced site. When large masses of users flock to the site at the same time, it overloads the site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. This is called the Slashdot effect and the site is said to be Slashdotted.
The phenomenon has been named after Slashdot, an award-winning technology-related news website launched in 1997. The website’s readers submit stories with links, inviting comments to start threaded discussions among users. The trouble starts when an article on the front page attracts an unusually large number of hits and causes a temporary surge in traffic on the linked website.
Major news sites or corporate websites are designed to deal with such large number of hits and therefore do not normally experience this effect. Websites with small bandwidths, however, are ill equipped to deal with this kind of traffic jam. They are used to getting only a few thousand hits a day and when the Slashdot effect occurs, the numbers can range from several hundred to several thousand hits per minute!
Picture Credit : Google
