Baseball Toaster: Fairpole : More Server Issues

More Server Issues

2006-02-13 10:24

by Ken Arneson

Our server is getting more traffic than it can handle, so I've put in an order for an upgrade. Hopefully, that'll happen within the few days.

Part of the problem is that we're getting blasted with tons of referer spam now. It's about 25% of our traffic. I've had enough. So I just installed a program to automatically block anything that looks like referer spam. So if you come to the Toaster from a url with the word "poker" or "casino" or "viagra" in it, you'll get an error now. It's only a matter of time before the evil referer spammers figure out how to get around this scheme, but it should buy us a temporary reprieve, if nothing else.

Part of the problem is the Fairpole software itself: in particular, the templating engine. A major upgrade for that should be coming soon, too.

Thanks for your patience.

Comments

2006-02-13 12:16:08

1. Ken Arneson

Wow, the referer spam just stopped completely after I started blocking it. Should have done that a loooong time ago.

2006-02-19 20:35:45

2. Mark

Ken, one quick helpful hint that can greatly reduce your outbound traffic. I don't know if you have access to modify Apache on your box, but I would strongly recommend putting in mod_deflate. That essentially gzip compresses your html pages served up to browsers, lowering your outbound traffic by at least 75%.

Another quick Apache tweak you can make is to ensure that you're running 2.0 with the "worker" MPM mode. This results in Apache running in a multi-process multi-threaded mode, each process being able to run X requests simultaneously -- as opposed to the default MPM which is one process per request. This winds up saving you a ton of memory, especially as you get more and more requests.

2006-03-23 10:04:46

3. scareduck

Hi, Ken. I know you probably don't read this blog much -- I know you don't post to it much -- but I have a request. Could you make it so session cookies last longer than just for the session?