Why This Site Is Sometimes Slow
June 29, 2007 – 11:16 amI have figured out why third-bit.com crawls from time to time: this blog is being inundated by a wave of comment spam. I’m using the Akismet plugin to filter it (I delete several hundred to several thousand spam comments a day, unread), but filing them away to be rejected is enough of a load on my server to constitute a denial of service attack in its own right :-(. I’m now thinking about relocating this domain and StreetKnit to dreamhost.com or some other hosting service — I hope that’ll provide more uniform service levels.
6 Responses to “Why This Site Is Sometimes Slow”
I use firewall rules to ratelimit incoming HTTP requests; handles the comment spammers reasonably well, but lets everyone else through:
${IPTABLES} -t filter -A extIN -j RDROP -p tcp –syn –dport 80 -m connlimit –connlimit-above 8
By Harald on Jun 29, 2007
If you’re considering signing up with Dreamhost, make sure you use some of those promo codes that are floating around to get a discount. I can offer you one too if you’d like.
By Thuan Ta on Jun 29, 2007
Dreamhost is great for a truckload of bandwidth and storage space, but don’t expect it to be fast.
By Andrey on Jun 29, 2007
The only thing I would advise is to not put it on dreamhost.com. Although their service is not bad, I find that they have much more downtimes than I would have liked, that’s fine for a small personal site, but a site that many people actually visit and read frequently should probably not use dreamhost.
By Igor on Jun 30, 2007
I’ve been a dreamhost customer for a year and a half and their service hasn’t been bad at all. They have been quick to respond to issues and in my experience, the staff has been pretty knowledgeable.
There have been times of horrible service last year, before they had a couple of upgrades and resolved a few network and data center issues. The situation appears to be good at the moment.
I have had close to 100% site up time in 2007, with 11 outages in total and an average response time of 0.6 seconds. But then again, I do not generate a lot of traffic.
They offer incredible value, but as Igor says, depending on your traffic, you may find a better deal/performance ratio elsewhere, especially if reliability is a must.
By Olivier on Jul 3, 2007
Are you certain that it is the comment spam? Robots and crawlers were the culprits to my site, particularly GoogleBot, which managed to consume nearly two gigabytes of bandwidth over the course of a month, ttwice the amount of bandwidth consumed by human clients. Other robots took up an additional gig. This resulted in Apache consuming all available RAM and swap space and a non-responsive server.
Hunting through the Apache logs, I found the main target was Trac, but my wiki also saw a lot of attetion from these crawlers. Dynamic sites drive them nuts, apparently. I added a robots.txt file to prohibit access to parts of those services; since then the load on my server dropped dramatically and it responds like a champ to real user requests now. I suggest checking your logs to see if you’re experiencing something similar and giving a robots.txt a try before giving up on DIY hosting.
By Chris Lasher on Jul 3, 2007