Web Performance, Branding, and Social Media
In: smp
28 Jun 2005Geek News Central is reporting that their server is getting crushed with all the new iTunes 4.9 users. You had to know this would happen. People have heard the buzz and want to hear what it’s all about.
From a Web performance perspective, podcasts are hellish: large, uncompressible binary files. At least they are able to [...]
In: RANTING
2 Jun 2005Ok, started to notice a dramtic and sudden increase in traffic to my site yesterday. Turns out that all of these folks were headed to the same place at this host:
/index.php?disp=stats
So, when I checked this out, they were all indicating referrals from the usual illicit medication and adult sites.
<sigh> More trackback and comment spam.
Now, I [...]
In: smp
2 May 2005I have been seeing a large number of hits with the following User-Agent string in my logs lately:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Firebird hasn’t existed as a browser for a very long time
A build date of October 7, 2003???
From 3 separate IP Addresses
This Apache REWRITE rule took care of this issue.
RewriteCond [...]
There is some idiot out there running a bot/attack protocol using a referring URL that always ends with ‘.eu.tt’.
Turns out that there was more than one IP involved. IPTABLES took care of them.
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 200.123.9.119 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 195.54.87.222 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 194.47.95.115 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -s 198.234.202.130 [...]
In: smp
2 Feb 2005Seth, who I am quoting way too often this week, has three great posts on finding a job. [here and here and here]
I am one of these people. I have a degree in History. I work in high-tech. I can write code when I want to. I can limp around linux, Windows and pretty much [...]
In: smp
2 Feb 2005All of my posts for the last 12 hours or so have been hung up in the PING phase. Looks like the Technorati Ping Server (rpc.technorati.com) is down or unavailable. I can’t even open a TCP connection to it.
In: Life
22 Jan 2005In the Business 2.0 Blog, the author posits on the possibility that eBay may be reaching the theoretical limits of its network growth potential. In this case, I do not mean the technical TCP/IP network; I mean the business to client network that has been created around this community.
eBay has been trying to move into [...]
In: GrabPERF
15 Dec 2004Starting at approximately 18:00 EST on December 14, 2004, Sears began blocking all incoming requests from my public IP address, most likely due to the GrabPERF testing I do from here.
How do I know it’s a filter and not a performance issue? Well, when I re-route traffic through one of the many thousands of open [...]
In: smp
30 Nov 2004Stumbled across some research today outlining how the concept of Shortest Remaining Processing Time can be used to improve Web performance. (Google references here and here).
This is a very interesting concept that forces the Kernel (needs to be done on a system that supports TCP stack mods) to be unfair in its allocation of resources, [...]