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

Make sure your pages support Last-Modified & If-Modified-Since and/or ETag & If-None-Match headers. With these you can avoid many computations and transfers totally.

Search for HTTP conditional GET for more information.