Baseball Toaster: Fairpole : More Server Issues

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?

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