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Help Beta Test The New Slashdot Server 69

Posted by CmdrTaco from the it's-all-fun-and-games dept.
Its been a long tradition here of letting Slashdot users pound on new boxes before we take them live, so if you don't have anything more exciting to do, feel free to test beta.slashdot.org. The new setup is bigger, faster, stronger, and will hopefully make these busy afternoons nice and perky. Please go post comments, moderate, meta moderate etc etc. When the dust settles, we'll make the big switch, and all will be well. We'll have detailed specs on the setup soon, too.
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Help Beta Test The New Slashdot Server More

Help Beta Test The New Slashdot Server

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  • Looks exactly like the old one.
    That's good. Means people are messing under the hood, not making fancy cute little useless visual changes.
  • Everbody...

  • Does any actions on the beta system affect the live system data?

    For example, if I were to try and be a troll (I'm waaay to intelligent to be a real troll :) ) would it knock my karma down.

    Here's looking to the future of Slashdot and more news for nerds!


    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --

  • Do We Get Free Stuff? (Score:3)

    by dougman ( 908 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @04:46AM (#1107133)
    Most Beta programs offer the volunteer testers free stuff. So what do we get? Slashdot T-Shirts? Underwear? Condoms? Kitchenware?

  • /. apparently needs less strict posting guidelines... there have been too many comments in the past week with people saying "I posted this 3 days ago, and it's been on Ars for 4 weeks", etc also I remember the time (*sigh*) when there was a new story up here every half hour or so. I had to visit /. constantly. More news. Less moderation. (let's hear it. reply if you agree?).
  • Hmm slashdot underwear...
    I can see the logo now:

    boxens for geeks, stuff you can slash in
  • People overuse beta as a term. ICQ2000a Beta 263? how can you have a beta alpha?!?! v1.06a v1.06b v1.061a v1.07 It's all greek to me!

  • i find that the new slashdot server still doesn't get me to the linked sites *any* faster then the old slashdot server. in fact, some sites are slashdotted and and i cannot connect at all...

  • How about:

    1 - Using something like Mercury or WebLoad,
    then posting the results.

    2 - Upgrading the image/ad servers too!

    - Chris
  • My commment are consistantly moderated down for being over-rated....how is a somewhat intelligent, or slightly funny comment sitting at 2 overrated... The point of moderation is to moderate the good stuff up....don't waste moderation points telling everyone that you don't have a sense of humor, waste em on good posts...I want to see quality at the top....lets see some 5's (and 6's)
  • Hey Rob, if I ask you about the new server will it slow down for 24 hours? =)
  • i was wondering when slashdot was going to speed up a bit-it seems lately that slashdot has been slashdotted.
    so, we need specs. processors, ram, etc, also info on the load-balancing. tech info. open-source the hardware or something. keep us informed.

  • [Insert whining about slashdot reporting old stories.]

    See! This was posted previously on August 30, 199 [slashdot.org] and March 8, 1999 [slashdot.org]. (And there was also a hardware change announced on June 27, 1998 [slashdot.org], but Rob apparently didn't have a testing period before that switch.)

    Actually, it's somewhat interesting to watch both Slashdot's progression through various hardware and the Slashdot readers' responses to the changes.


    --Phil (It's also interesting just to look at the change in overall attitude of the comments through time.)
  • Posted by BSD-Pat:

    externally, nothing....under the hood and network wise....its EXTREMELY different.... try a 100Mbit pipe, for one.

  • A comment to the /. crew (Score:3)

    by spiralx ( 97066 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @05:06AM (#1107144)

    Kind of offtopic, but anyway. I browse at -1 since I like to be able to see everything, but the posts below that consist of endless copies of "DEEZ NUTZ IS SUX0RED BY SLASHDOT" is very annoying and makes /. take a lot longer to load.

    Could we have it so that comments at -1 are cut off at 15 lines or so, with the "Read the rest of this comment..." link after that? It's a simple solution IMHO to the cut-n-paste spammers, and doesn't require any changes to the moderation system.

    Comments are welcome.

  • Being that there were no frontend changes, some spec's on the beta page listing whats differnt would have been greatly appreciated.
  • Seeing how the big boys implement their architectures separating servers from storage (the much hyped SAN - Storage Area Network) and how they are all heading towards fiber-attached disks, I wonder about the actual setup at Slashdot. Is it based on the SAN concept ? Or is it all server-attached storage ? Why not put a DIA diagram of the architecture or some kind of white paper.
    --
    The world is divided in two categories:
    those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
  • Thank god you guys are finally doing something about the extreme slowness of the site...the beta site is considerably faster.

    So, it's obviously superior. I want to know more about the setup, though. FreeBSD on dual 1 GHz processors, gig of ram, etc. Are the servers geographically distributed? Or in one place? What's the connectivity? How are you doing the load balancing, an L4 switch or something cheap and cheesy like RR DNS?

    Post the technical details! This is slashdot, afterall.

  • Hang in there (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I love you guys.

    I mean, the pointless repeated-text posts suck, but those aren't really trolls. They're just idiots.

    The creative, smartass, irreverant trolls are one of slashdot's best things. At their best, they are like watching a good parody of a news event after watching the same damn "serious" story time and time again. The opinions and moderation on this site are lame and predictable. It is very rare that I see a truly "insightful" or "interesting" post. Most of it is the standard "Open Source/Perl/Linux is great. Censorware/Microsoft/Big companies suck."

    But the trolls... You guys sacrifice your karma for my entertainment. So what if I have to browse at -1? It's worth it to catch an occasional offbeat humorous comment. It's worth it to know that there will always be fresh hot grits waiting for me on each article.

    It's worth it to know that there are still people who aren't caught up in the "change the world with Linux" mentality. Some of the others would do well to pull the stuffed Tux doll out of their asses and lighten up. IT'S JUST COMPUTERS, TWITS!

    I'm not a troll, but I am a troll sympathizer. I'm rooting for you guys.

    -- A karma whore posting AC
  • I can't reach it

    has the beta site been slashdotted ?
  • A network error occurred:

    Cannot connect to server
    The server may be down or unreachable.

    Try connecting again later.
    (But it responds to pings...)
    --
  • The new slashdot server appears to be slashdotted...
  • ME TOO!

    Oh well, you get the point...
  • I can't get the page. Looks like slashdot is slashdotted.
  • Ok, I agree.

    More news.
  • That already exists, have a look at your preferences page...

  • It was working (Score:3)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @05:22AM (#1107156) Homepage

    It was working, really fast to... but I think it got slashdotted.

    If slashdot runs a news story about slashdot, does the slashdot site get slashdotted in an infinate loop?
  • Hey! At least we don't have to pay to participate, like Microsoft's ßeta's :).

    -Kris
  • Go to Customise Comments in your User Info and play with the last 3 options there (Short/Long Comment Penalty/Bonus and Max Comment Size). This should be what you need.
  • confirmed that DOS really means Denial Of Slashdot
  • ...is /.'ed. It takes from 45s to forever to load the front page. Compare to 6s to 15s at slashdot.org. Maybe it's just half the /. user population running obsessive reloading scripts against it. I guess I'll have to check it out later.
  • It has been down some. It is beta. We will bring things up and down with some regularity while we are tuning and testing and finding bugs. Thanks. :)
  • I've got two windows open: one on Slashdot.org, the other on beta.slashdot.org. Granted, the beta servers are probably not getting the full load yet, but I loaded articles with comment counts in the 300-500 range and timed the differences in loading time (BTW, I'm on a not heavily burdened T-1 from work). Anyhoo, in all cases the articles loaded two to two and a half times faster.

    2nd Try, server not found, then refreshed -- got an extremely fast load, so it looks like the guys are tweaking in the background.

    Once the bugs are worked out, it looks like another round of kudos due to the /. techies. Good job, guys!!

  • Is it me, or does the old site seem quicker? Maybe b/c you're all on the beta site :P Seriously tho, the old site came right up, the new one sat there after giving me the usuall /. header pics.

  • That's not quite it - you can truncate all posts after a certain number of lines, but a 5 rated post with 60 lines I'd want to read, but a -1 post with 60 lines of spam is just taking up space. And you can only mark long comments up, not down.

  • Certainly in the afternoon, when the sluggards in the States wake up, swobble their burgers with a can of coke, unlock their xwindows and slashdot slashdot, it gets little fun slashing the dot, if you know what I mean.

    But than, I tried this beta machine. Wizzling speed, my friend! Like that box is standing next to me.... methink it's time to use my bandwith and see how many postings perl can make per second.... must be great fun. Dinner can wait.

    But when do we get to see those specs? I want to know everything. Perl? php? C? Cluster? PostgreSQL? Visual Basic? W2k? Solaris? AU/X? Minix? Parallel-SCSI-RAID-5?

    Cheers && wait for some scripts...

    BTW, when hitting the beta, you can moderate twice, how nice.

  • First Root! (Score:3)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @06:11AM (#1107166)
    Woohoo! I'm the first one to gain root access! I posted this by hand using vi!
  • please please PLEASE tell me you were joking with this.

    they're not upgrading the other sites' servers, idiot, just the slashdot server. the front page will load faster, but the linked sites run on their OWN servers and slashdot has NOTHING to do with that.

    -Andy Martin
  • Yeah, as a matter of fact, the new /. servers are running the icq 2000a beta person web servers... I hear they're blazingly fast

    ---
  • Are the boxes going to be physically in a different location? Are the beta servers located where they are going to be when they go live? The traceroutes from my location are MUCH different from me to www.slashdot.org and beta.slashdot.org. Ah well, just wondering. It probably isn't a very complete beta test if the beta servers are going to be moved to a new location before they do go live.
  • Hang on a second... am I missing something here?
  • Guys - don't know if it's important or not to know, but the http://beta.slashdot.org/ servers were dishing out NO RESPONSE after two attempts. Hope it helps - Happy_Guru
  • So, is the new /. going to be niftier for us AvantGo folks?

    I read the FAQ,
    did the hack,
    but I'm a /. crack whore...

    Darnit... that "crack whore" comment is going to come back to haunt me when I run for political office.

    -DD
  • What are you smoking? How was the last poster a "flamebait"? He was saying something very clueful about the issues of serving large globs of data to a busy website. Please, next time, check what you are clicking on before you moderate.


    If design is not Bauhaus, it is Baroque.

  • Re:First Root! (Score:3)

    by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong.gmail@com> on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:03AM (#1107174) Homepage
    Woohoo! I'm the first one to gain root access! I posted this by hand using vi!

    Hahahaha oh, I see. So vi can now insert rows into MySQL tables, eh? :-)
    --
  • The old server is responding better than the new one.

    Hey Andover... stop messing around with lame PC hardware and break down and get a small farm of load balanced Sun boxes. Or one big honkin' Sun box. PC servers aren't holding up well and Slashdot continues to be one of the slowest sites I visit in my daily surfing.
  • ...now the trolls can post faster, better, longer! ;>
  • please please PLEASE tell me you've been up for three days straight and that's why you've misplaced your sense of humor...or do you respond this way to knock-knock jokes, too?

    Knock, knock
    Who's there?
    Duane
    Duan who?
    Duane the bathtub, I'm dwowning

    you're names not duane, idiot, you're not in a bathtub and you're NOT drowning..
  • Apparently someone who thinks that they are beta-moderating marked down the above perfectly reasonable post.
  • But I found I was able to post replies to articles that haven't yet loaded on beta.slashdot. I entered this URL: http://beta.sl ashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/04/27/1030206&mode=th read [slashdot.org] and got the elusive First Post!
  • It would probably help if more of the story links
    worked. Most of them are ending in 404's currently
    which doesnt make any type of testing very useful.
  • It's about time you switched. The old set up used round robin DNS to load balance the servers! Uhhm, hello???? I am actually surprised it worked at all. I sure hope this time it's a more sensible setup. (hint hint: www.linux-vs.org)

    ___
  • Hey, if you check out the "sections" they don't quite match up what I get when i do it on the regular /. server...

    ie, if you hit apache, I get like 2mos of topics, instead of the usual 10 or so. and some of the other sections don't have the headers and crap that they usually have. maybe a bug.... maybe they just like to abuse bandwidth.
  • I'd rather vote for someone running *from* political office.
  • OOG may have a hard time adjusting to the new server. Go there and try to post something all caps. It WON'T LET YOU. This post probably wouldn't make it past the "lameness filter" they've implemented (I tried with varying portions of the comment capsed and it won't let anything with more than like two words capsed through).

    I hope they reconsider this one, as the moderators seem to take care of shouters pretty well, and the only person who seems to use all caps regularly is one of the funnier posters we have (IMO). Please, Rob, preserve the individualism that has made slashdot as fun to visit as it has been in the past, and at least give OOG a special dispensation or something :D
  • I posted something similar a while back, only I ws thinking more of a sliding scale. Any 0 posts should be cut off at 10 lines by default, anything at -1 gets it at 5 lines. If it gets moderated up then make it add 5 or 10 lines for each point it gets moderated up. In your preferences you could adjust the sliding scale by X lines in either direction...

    One other idea I had was a "SPAM" moderation category, specifically for the ^C^V people, the sex stories and also the complaint generator/filter folks, that implemented the above sliding scale, while leaving normally moderated posts the way they currently are handled.

  • Looks like... (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:33AM (#1107186) Homepage Journal
    The beta site has not only been slashdotted, but has suffered a DB roll-back, too.

    Assuming that wasn't a one-off, I hope that Rob upgrades to the ultra-latest versions of Slash, Perl, mod_perl and MySQL. To minimise server lag, I'd also recommend using Apache 1.3.12 + SGI Apache Acceleration patches. PGCC is a good bet, too.

    I would =strongly= suggest that script fans stress-test the beta system above and beyond the call of duty. That'll give Rob, et al, a better idea of how the system will behave under extreme system loads. (Better to find that out now, than when the system goes live.)

    Last, but not least, Rob - install ip-utils, compile the QoS drivers, and soft-limit the throughput. This will reduce the chances of the server blowing up every few minutes from being Slashdotted. (By using soft-limits, users can borrow unused bandwidth off each other. This makes a lot of sense. Or a lot more sense than relying on luck and penguin mints.)

  • I very much agree! When I realized they didn't let allcaps through, that was the first thing I thought of. However, MiXEd CaPs is let through as long as I lowercase enough of the letters. That IMHO could be much much worse.
  • The "hof" link off of the front page goes to a list. Click the very first entry in the first list, and you will see two bugs:
    1. A 404 error and
    2. The mailto link is correct, but the text for the link is something like "yourname@domain.com" or the like

  • I know this is more an Ask Slashdot question but

    As slashdot seems to use MySQl.
    What difference is there in access time for running queries between using MySQL and more expensive SQL databases such as Oracle.
    Doe slashdot use MySQL because its free or does it provide performance enhancements as well
  • Finally, slashdot move to a decent colo facility.... ABOUT TIME BOYS.....
  • I am not on crack. I am smoking a big fat joint. I was moderator until I posted this.
  • As of 5:38 EST, the DB were still out of sync. are they off of the same server, or are they different, and supposed to be different? Is there a complete copy of /. on the beta, or is some stuff still not moved over yet? keep up the good work.
  • Anyone seen the weird horizontally stretched formating on the spoof RMS stubs his toe article ?
    Is this a bug or just a further spoof in the vein of the article ?

  • Re:First Root! (Score:3)

    by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @12:56PM (#1107194)
    > Hahahaha oh, I see. So vi can now insert rows into MySQL tables, eh? :-)

    Ah, uhm, well, uh, maybe I used emacs then. It was really dark, I couldn't see...
  • We all know what happens to sites linked to in /. stories. Since a (beta) version of /. is now linked from a story, could slashdot be (theoretically) slashdotted? I tried to load it and it looks that way to me.
  • Please do not talk about Slashdot underwear.

    Next thing we'll see is Robin Miller talking about his workplace dress code: "Pants Optional."
    --

  • Dr. Nick:
    "HI EVERYBODY!!"...

    "Hi, Dr. Nick!!"

    you're right, i did wanna.

  • It would be cool if you could submit snippets of Perl code to process comments for you; then you could get things like 'truncate all -1 posts over 15 lines' without needing to pester Rob to implement them. The problem with this is security and the scope for DoS attacks. Perl has a module called Safe to run code in sandboxes, and it's easy to timeout things if they run for too long, but even so it's a scary idea.

    Java has something similar called 'servlets' (untrusted code to run on the server), but I don't think it ever took off.

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