2005.10.30
Server Still Hammered, Doing Better
It looks like the server is still getting hammered by weirdos searching for celebrity nudity and not finding anything. This whole incident is making me think that I might want to reevaluate the configuration of OOKEE.com. I have a few options.
The one I’m brooding on the most is to switch the main www.ookee.com site to a hosting provider and changing from the current Blosxom engine to either WordPress or Drupal. The question then becomes where to go with OOKEE Prime. Does it remain purely a linkblog as it has been for the past almost three years? Or do we turn it into something more?
I’m leaning towards leaving it a simple linkblog since this isn’t a full time job. Perhaps in another few years it will be necessary to expand again. Any thoughts from the three or four of you that are reading this? Change to a new format? Recommendations for a hosting provider?
Categorized: geek technology
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5 Responses to “Server Still Hammered, Doing Better”
- Fletcher says (November 6th, 2005 at 19:56:50 )
Speeding up blosxom
Before I switched from blosxom to Oddmuse, I had some similar concerns about speeding up the time it took for blosxom to serve web pags (I wasn’t getting hammered for nudity, however… ;)I didn’t want to switch blosxom to static mode, because I wanted to have comments and the like, but I wanted the speed of serving pre-saved html files.
I finally realized that a “hybrid” system would offer the best of both words, and posted a few thoughts about this to the mailing list. The basic concept being that when blosxom is run to generate a page, it saves a copy as a static html page. Using some .htaccess magic, when a visitor requests a URL, they receive the static page if it exists. If not, blosxom generates it for them and saves a copy for next time. If they do something interactive, then the URL would specify the blosxom cgi script, and it would automatically be generated.
I never quite got around to doing this for blosxom, but I still believe it is possible.
I DID, however, do this exact thing for my Oddmuse wiki. It’s on my site here:
http://fletcher.freeshell.org/wiki/Static_Hybrid_Module .I have to say that it works wonderfully. With exception of visiting the root URL, any other page is pre-saved as an html file, making the server delay almost non-existent. Pages reload almost instantly (like back in the old days before so much cgi crap… ;) Even though my server is not the fastest out there by any means, my web site is really responsive. It works almost seemlessly with the interactive bit as well (the only problem I have found is that fields are not pre-filled via cookies when adding a comment. I can live with this.)
Just yesterday, I used a similar approach to serve up my wiki pages as pdf’s. The first time they are requested, there’s a delay as the pdf is generated. After that, it’s just a regular file download.
The one caveat of all of this, of course, is that it becomes more difficult (if not impossible) to have dynamic content on your pages that update each time a page is loaded. I thought about this, and realized that I think that the dynanim content thing is overdone for the most part, and I was willing to clean up my design for the sake of performance.
I’m sure the same thing can be done for blosxom. If you’re interested in doing this, I would be willing to help out - I am a believer in trying to optimize the performance of websites, which is something many people have gotten away from by using complicated cgi scripts with every plugin in the book…. I was as guilty of that as the next person…
- Fletcher says (November 6th, 2005 at 19:58:30 )
Sorry for the run-on paragraph above. I wasn’t aware you didn’t have block or markdown or something running on your comments to provide paragraphs…
- dugh daren says (November 7th, 2005 at 02:37:10 )
Help and No Worries
I fixed the paragraph breaks. I never did install anything to take care of autobreaks. I guess I’m just too used to doing it myself and forget that most of the world doesn’t!I’ve thought about doing a static/dynamic hybrid, but the one time I tried didn’t work at all. Part of that is at the time I didn’t know how to use the mod_rewrite module (as in turn it on) and now I’m just too used to how things are.
I’m still determined to migrate the main http://www.ookee.com site to WordPress. The site is growing just too much and too fast. I would love, however, to have this site as a hybrid. Many people on the blosxom mailing list have been grumbling about how to create a hybrid site. If you would help me figure out how to get this site built out hybrid then I could write an article about it because I don’t think anyone has yet.
A plugin version of the Static_Hybrid_Module sounds really ideal. Is there some way I should proceed? I don’t want to impede on your time as this isn’t really your problem to deal with…
- Fletcher says (November 7th, 2005 at 03:59:52 )
Initial Thoughts
When I was first thinking about this, I thought that the easiest way might be to run blosxom in static mode to generate pre-existing pages for index views and each story. The mod_rewrite module (which some host servers do not allow) could be configured to pass any non-existing pages to the blosxom cgi in the usual way.
The trick is then to regenerate pages that are modified. In a wiki this is relatively easy, I modified the save routine to export another copy of the page. For blosxom, it might require a cron job, or an additional step when you edit a story.
You can, however, update the comment/writeback process to update a page whenever additional comments are added. Depending on your setup, you might also have to update the appropriate index page(s). In my oddmuse module, you can set up hashes to “link pages” in such a way, but it automatically updates “parent” pages as needed.
My email address is on my website if you want to move this off-page and work on the details. Maybe I’ll even set up a small test-bed blosxom site again. Been a while since I’ve used it…
- Fletcher says (November 7th, 2005 at 06:22:03 )
Demo Version Up
I hate getting sucked into things…. ;)
I created a quick demo of a blosxom site running in hybrid mode. Read about it on my wiki:
