My Opera News

My Opera was on Slashdot again today!

This time is Hallvord's fault :-)

Yesterday he wrote a blog post about an epic Javascript fail that today was picked up by several major web sites in Norway and in the U.S. and mostly probably elsewhere.

We realized there was something strange going on because of the unusual load and number of requests on our front-end servers. Analyzing the logs, it was clear that Hallvord's post was getting lots of pageviews per second, mostly from Slashdot, but also from Reddit and from the norwegian online magazine Digi.

The blog post was immediately put into our list of "hot content" to be cached, and everything was fine again in a couple of minutes. The idea for the future is to be able to automatically detect such high number of requests, at least for blog posts, and automatically cache them. Another alternative could be to enable blog post caching by default, but this should be done very carefully, because blog pages contain dynamic content that usually depends on the visiting user and on the user who is the "owner" of the page.

We'll see...