Tom Pinckney, co-founder of Hunch, recently prescribed some tips on how to survive being Slashdotted. While Slashdot is no longer the biggest online driver of spikes of traffic, there was a time when it was the king of bringing down sites: a simple mention of a URL on the home page would crush most servers.

These days sites like Yahoo, Digg, and Drudge Report often carry much more weird, but Tom’s lessons apply to any situation where you are going to get a huge spike in traffic (expected or otherwise). There’s a lot of good stuff in Tom’s post, as well as previous one about achieving “consistent performance” that are well worth a read.

Perhaps the best advice Tom gives is:

If using Apache, use worker MPM with MaxClients and ServerLimit as high as you have RAM for. Better to cap max # of threads and reject some users than let the whole machine go down.

This is an important point people often forget: eventually you will fail, so better plan to fail gracefully.

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