Stumbleupon is impressive vis-a-vis EvE Online mining scandal

So we got this article posted on Vox ex Machina about the newest drama to hit EvE Online. It's about a terrific bug in the moon mining that allows large corporations to exploit moon masses for basically infinite minerals.

Stumbleupon found this article, and hyped it to hell in back. We have managed to exceed—and survive—the greatest numbers of the slashdotting that took out the server earlier this month. Over the past two days we have absorbed over 15k impressions just from Stumbleupon, punking us straight up into 10.2k impressions in a single day. The spikes from the slashdotting (and Redditing/Digging) only reached 4.8k and 5.0k on their respective days.

Moon mining was added to EvE online in November, 2004 during the Exodus expansion, a patch originally called Shiva. Since then certain people have been taking huge advantage of this. One corp in particular, Band of Brothers, which has basically been the pet of CCP (the parent company that runs EvE) had been siphoning this exploit for a very long time yet managed to sail through this unscathed.

Who knew?

Wow to Stumbleupon; and thank goodness for the quick caching that I wrote into the Wordpress installation, otherwise we’d be down again.

I think I just discovered exactly how much of traffic Willowisp can handle

And it's not pretty. As of this moment, voxexmachina.com is dead in the water.

kitteh@willowisp:~> uptime
  7:45pm  up 48 days  7:32,  4 users,  load average: 133.25, 125.97, 90.26

Yes. It looks like it has managed to hit almost 133 load. There were 11 comments on Ceroptera's Age of Conan article, and climbing. While people are positing it was a DDOS, I think it was something much more mundane.

I think that it’s basically the social media version of being slashdotted.

This is assuming, of course, that he didn’t secretly post something about nudepatches and mods to Reddit when I had my back turned.

>.<

This is my make it stop! face.

Update 2008-12-03 9:06pm: Looks like we managed to get it rebooted; let’s see how long this lasts.