Tim Starling wrote:
It's quite a complex feature. If you have a server that deadlocks or is otherwise extremely slow, then it will block rendering for all other attempts, meaning that the article can not be viewed at all. That scenario could even lead to site-wide downtime, since threads waiting for the locks could consume all available apache threads, or all available DB connections.
It's a reasonable idea, but implementing it would require a careful design, and possibly some other concepts like per-article thread count limits.
*nod* We should definitely ponder the issue since it comes up intermittently but regularly with big news events like this. At the least if we can have some automatic threshold that temporarily disables or reduces hits on stampeded pages that'd be spiffy...
-- brion