Bandwidth and avoiding the slashdot/digg effect

As I’ve spent the day doing some pre-emptive maintenance type stuff on our servers, I noticed that one of our servers appeared to have way slower ping times than normal from our other servers.

Taking a closer look I also saw that the logs said it having timeout problems talking to our database server.

A quick look at the server logs showed that the server in question was using 100% of its bandwidth for the last hour or so according to Monit.

A quick check with ntop (excellent web based network analysis statistics) and iftop (console based network traffic analysis) confirmed that 99.5% of the bandwidth was going to HTTP requests.
Strangely enough, the server wasn’t even stressed at all (I guess I’ve overspecced that one!)

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