If you have used Digg.com for any length of time then you are probably aware of the dreaded “Digg Effect”. This usually happens when a story reaches the Digg.com home page and the site to which the story refers receives so much traffic that its server becomes overwhelmed and can no longer keep up with page requests effectively taking the site offline. It is an annoyance for Digg readers and a major problem for web site owners. While witnessing the Digg effect happen to this story this afternoon, an idea came to me that I in-turn emailed to the Digg site team.
“Why not create a Digg Effect Meter?”
A Digg Effect meter would appear next to each story title and would show the real-time responsiveness of a “dugg” site by sending periodic requests to the site and updating the meter via AJAX. This way Digg users could see how badly “dugg” a site is and choose to visit the site later if traffic is too high. This would help both Digg readers and site owners and allow the Digg community to effectively self-manage the Digg effect. What do you think?
Link back to Digg:
http://digg.com/programming/Possible_Solution_to_the_Digg_Effect
[tags]digg,effect,web development,ajax,youos,mcnitt[/tags]
Hey, i just wanted to say that is a great idea, also
maybe once dugg the site owner could say “i want a max of 50 connections” or w/e, so then when the digg effect o meter get’s to 50 it would say “The webmaster prefers that you wait untill the traffic slows down a bit” (you could still go to the page tho) hopefully this would discourage a few people
visit the site later? yeah right, the whole point of dig is to click click click!
The ajax calls to update the meter would actually overwhelm the target server even more. And make digg more resource consuming for readers. Basically, this wouldnt help unless it’s a static meter updated on the server side, not ajax.
jd:
Yes, this is true, but the working assumption here is that the possible load saved would be greater than the load generated by a Digg meter.
The Digg site would only be one requesting source and would only need to make a few very small requests to calculate responsiveness (i.e. – one ping per minute or request a small piece of content such as a tiny image file after an initial page crawl). Meter requests could even be dynamically throttled based on real time results (i.e. – make fewer update requests as server response times increase). Maybe it could even email the registered domain owner to notify them that their site is being Dugg.
Funnily, I was thinking about a Greasemonkey script to do something along the way…thing is, when the page owners take up some static content to fend off the load and give some info, any script will have to assume that the content is still there…
A better was would for digg to archive the website itself, so users view the page from digg’s servers. the meter won’t deter people.
@Jackson
A good idea but it would be limited to static content. What if it’s an application-based site? On the subject of caching, I recall Kevin and Alex saying that they were against caching because it would deny the site owner advertising revenue.
I don’t think a meter would deter all people from clicking through; in fact it might even encourage some. My thought is though that if Digg users could see that a site was completely dugg (i.e. – not responding) they could choose to move to the next story and come back to it later when the meter shows the site is in fact responding. It would save Digg users time and hopefully help site owners.