I was sitting here thinking; While I will never be slashdotted (Or similar violent surge scenarios), there is a good chance that while Radiant gains traction, that someone somewhere will end up being on the blunt end of a slashdotting. Now, I've been brainstorming on ideas for Radiant to attempt to incorporate some level of slashdotting protection, and some I feel could be fairly easily incorporated into extensions (Though I'm not quite daring enough to try to build an extension yet...)
Idea A: Pre-Designed 'Thin' site and auto-switchover With this idea, someone would have one or multiple pre-designed layouts which are essentially stripped-down versions of their sites which then be applied to the pages much like how layouts are applied now. The extension would prebuild the entire set of pages upon a 'Cache Clear.' -- This may slow down your site, but if you suspect you may have got a top-notch article or getting popular enough to be targetted by slashdot or other social bombarding, may save your butt. As soon as the extension detects in some form of either extreme-accelerated increase in visitors per second or from common 'sources' of the slashdot effect, it immediately switches over to the cached version and pulls Radiant out as much as possible from any interaction/updates which may cripple the process even worse. Idea B: Ability to 'cache' a full-site in a different directory in html format (Including the ability to do the above as well.) Many hosts (Mine included) have auto-failover services where if some reason your main install tanks or your bandwidth is accelerating at a maddening pace, it will allow your site to roll over to another directory structure altogether. The ability to have Radiant build a full set of html files which work the same was as your site would in a separate site may again be able to save some face when the slash comes for you. Idea C: Ability to totally disable pages or force a redirect to a specific page. Okay, you know you've JUST been slashdotted and you already see the traffic coming (Or better yet, Idea A kicks in on its own,) You want to be able to (or let A decide) to be able to disable an entire set of pages except the targeted page and possibly a main home page with some RSS feeds or similar if someone tries to visit any specific page outside of what has been slashdotted (IE:- We're sorry, we're in the middle of being slashdotted at this link - Here's some RSS feeds for the future.). This would be handy in deed to minimize amount of 'wandering' damage to your site, taking you totally down, while hopefully retaining some of the slashdot visitors for future visits as well by providing them a little extra. There should be a quick and easy (AND fast) to be able to do this. Okay, I had this more refined in my head, but hopefully the picture is pretty clear. I feel that a site's worst nightmare is being slashdotted into hell, and while I don't know if a Ruby on Rails site or Radiant can stand up to it, but it'd be nice to be prepared. Andy (BladedThoth) _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: [email protected] Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
