This is a little funny. Yahoo got slashdotted today. It was because of Michael Radwin's PHPCon 2002 talk on Yahoo adopting PHP. The funny thing is that it held up just fine--served by a single FreeBSD server running Apache. The hardware was nothing special. So, why is it that when most sites get "featured" on Slashdot, they crumble?
They generally have two fatal flaws: (1) not enough bandwidth, and (2) dynamic content. We're fortunate enough to have some excellent network connectivity, so we can handle a lot of traffic. The fact that public.yahoo.com was serving static files, no PHP or anything fancy, meant that the CPU had time to spare. During the peak of traffic, the CPU was still over 50% idle much of the time. Running a tail -f against the apache log was quite amusing. It was scrolling really, really fast.
Reading over the comments, I noticed that almost everyone suffered from a similar mental disorder: they didn't bother to read slides before commenting. It's really pathetic. Won't the Slashdot freaks ever learn?
Ah, well. I suppose that's what's so great about free speech, huh?