How can I detect and survive being “Slashdotted”?

Question

What\'s a good way to survive abnormally high traffic spikes?

My thought is that at some trigger, my website should temporarily switch into a \"low bandwidth\" mode: swi

Answer 1

nearlyfreespeech.net is a semi-cloud so to speak and helps a ton in situations like this. As others above mentioned, layered caching helps a lot. Pull chunks of information from memcached instead of the database, have a reverse proxy (or a distributed reverse proxy aka CDN, Panther Networks is cheap) in front of you.