The Outage
The blog has been mostly inaccessible for the last hour or so - it was a scaling issue with one of the early things I did in the server code. At the bottom of the page here is a list of referers. I have Smalltalk code that generates that, and it has been running in the same image that serves the blog pages. The problem? Traffic (especially spam traffic) is up - so having a process that read log files, filtered them (in memory) and then spit out the cleansed files to be read by the server was a little too much - each time the log scan code ran, it was slowing the server down - and finally, today, just making it inaccessible.
The answer, of course, is to move that code out of the main server and run it as a cron job - which is what I have to do now.
Comments
Problems posting
[Troy Brumley] October 11, 2005 15:08:39.297
Trackback from The Doctor is in
Problems posting by Troy Brumley
I had some problems trying to post this morning due to Jim's ongoing battle with referrer spam. I still say, "death to spammers." Anyway, there are some typos and categories to clean up, but I deleted the duplicate posts.
Even with a good WYSIWYG editor, I like to review my posts up on the web page to see how they look and do one last scan for errors. I don't know if that's too much attention to devote to blogging or not, but it's true to who I am.
Note: I was unable to post this through the web interface for our site, so I'm attempting to do this from BottomFeeder. The site is obviously having a bad day with the referrer spam bots beating on it heavily.