At about 8:00am PST a story by Allen Strider, “Fly a Remote Control plane that doesn’t suck for $30 bucks” was dugg up to 1st page of digg.com. To any of you who don’t know, digg.com is a website where users can submit links to other web pages, so that other users can vote for. The votes determine the order in which links are displayed within digg.com so that the most popular stories get to be positioned first on the 1st page.

digg.com is a very popular site and is quite a phenomenon. Being so popular, stories that are posted on the home page receive a lot of traffic. the volume of traffic can be so high and so sudden, that many websites that have stories on digg’s home page crash. This phenomenon is known as the “digg effect“.

Today we experienced our first digg effect. Starting at about 8:00am our server was flooded with 10,000s requests simultaneously. Many of you who tried to use Triond or to view any of our content websites received warning messages, error messages, incomplete pages or even no response at all. We apologize for that.
To us – this also came as surprise. As soon as we realized what was going on we started fixing the problems that occurred as a result of the digg effect, and managed to stabilize the server. While writing this, Allen Strider’s story is down in digg’s 2nd page – still receiving 1,000s of views – and our server performs just about good as always.

Of course, a digg effect is a very positive thing that can happen if it is handled right. Now that we’ve experienced it for the first time, we know what to expect the next time and I hope that now we can handle digg effects without problems similar to those occurred today.