Weekend Slowdown Cause(s)

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 | Life

So I wake up on Saturday morning and try to load my site and it times out.  WTF!?  So I reset the server and then jump on.  Only seems to take another hour or less for it to happen again.  Now the annoying thing is my statistics haven’t been working in a week at this point so pinpointing the cause of the slowdown is a bit more complicated and I had things that I had planned to do. 

Well here was my discoveries. 

1st the company that holds the dedicated server this is on had a Denial of Service attack early in the morning.  They were able to stop it, but that took it’s tole on my site. 

Next it seems that somebody very stupid, but persistent was trying to hack into my site with an exploit, creating needless errors in my logs. 

Then came the somewhat cool things that until today I was unable to verify because my statistics were broken.  I got slammed by popular sites linking my site to their front page.  CollegeHumor.com was one of them and Gorillamask.net was another.  These are both very popular sites and landing on their front page ensures that you will get a lot of traffic all at one time.  I was also submitted to digg.com, however the submission on digg was ignored due to there already being a duplicate submission for my site from 2 or 3 years earlier, so nobody digged the new submission.  I was amused by the collegehumor page since they actually call links “hotlinks” which if you have ever sat and listened to me for awhile you would know that hotlinking to entire pages is evil.  Obviously they just choose to mean “Hot Links” instead of hotlinks, and they weren’t being evil, but nice in linking to me. 

Okay so now there is a ton of new traffic, and in typical fashion they go directly to the nintendo or sega pages and then just keep reloading the games over and over since they can’t choose one to play, which makes good use of the cpu and ram.

Well it gets worse, because it seems there was a problem with the script I use to write the new blog posts on the main page.  One of them had been trying to write to a cache file, but had been unable to do so because the cache file was read only.  Had the server nto slowed to a crawl I would have never found this problem at all because I am not the one who figured it out, my server host was feeling generous and helped me to see that. 

That meant that every single person who loaded the main page did 2 things, they generated a message in an error log and they had to use more server cpu in order to load the list of my recent posts. 

Crazy eh.  Well, I welcome all the new return visitors and will tell you that the games page which you came here for will be expanding and changing a LOT in a week or two, so stick around and tell a friend.  Hopefully my server can handle all of you. 

               

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