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

No one has mentioned load balancing... haproxy, etc. Optimize, cache and load balance should survive almost anything. That being said, I'm not sure if stackoverflow is behind a load balancer ;)