Hopeless Geek

After 167 (published) comments, I’ve decided to close the comment thread on the Careful, America post. Thanks to those that amused me, but the number of people that were just downright idiots far outnumbered you and the time it took to keep that page kind of sane was slowly eating into Real Life™.

Here’s some perspective on the traffic mess. I won’t harp on this much longer, but I felt this was a good way to explain the fire I was fighting from having a “traditional” configuration.

Here’s the bandwidth chart as of right now:

Note that huge peak? That’s where I figured out having a 500KB PNG was a bad idea. The server died after that (except for that little blip of traffic after it). Once I put the smaller file in place, I got that steady line of traffic after it.

Okay, so that’s interesting. Here’s the comparison, though. The Krispy Kreme Luther thing? That doesn’t even register on the year:

I’m at once happy, disturbed, and shocked. It’s a strange feeling. But, on the upside, I now know that the server can take a strong hit well and don’t have to deal with this mess again (unless I post a file over about 100KB again).

So that McCain/Cotton image? Yeah … linked to all over the frakkin ‘net (hotlinked sometimes, too; bastards).

This was perhaps a bad time to try moving the site from mod_php to mod_fcgid, or, depending on how you look at it, the perfect time. More on that later.

So the first 8K hits came from StumbleUpon, which I forgot existed. Then when that was done the forums picked it up and started hotlinking it all over the place (and I’ve resisted the urge to drop something evil in its place only because I have the bandwidth to take it — go Quantact!).

That was a nice test of my new arrangement for PHP, to say the least. The server started to choke early on and then I discovered that Tracker.module was logging an error to the database on every page hit. Turned off the module and replaced it with the Views equivalent and it came right back up (no more writing to the DB).

Then it appears Reddit picked it up (as a hotlink, of course). Funny thing about getting high up on Reddit: the top 30 or so links are at the bottom of frickin-Wired-dot-com. Yep, Wired. So I’m getting that as well.

I looked at the traffic stats tool on Quantact and saw that I went from near-nothing to 600Kb/s, then 1.1Mb/s, then 2.1Mb/s and it was going up even more. What the hell? I looked at the file … I’d saved it as a PNG. A 500KB PNG.

I made a JPEG version and added the proper redirect and updated the blog entry. Now everyone gets the 100K file, my usage has fallen to 300-400Kb/s, and the site is very responsive now (compared to when it was at 2.1Mb/s at least).

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. I’m just a little shocked. This round is much worse than when Slashfood picked up the Krispy Kreme Luthers a few weeks ago and I’m loving the lesson in how to keep a server going in 384MB of RAM.

We’re at 30K hits to the actual page and an additional 25K for the images.

This is fun.

After some tweaking to get it working the way I wanted it, I finally got my version of the Solemnity theme working on the site.

I copied the theme to a new one and am going to start really mucking around with the finer points as time goes on, but I rather like the overall feel of it. I’d always wanted a primarily white theme for this site and this works well in that department.

Oh, and the site should be much faster now. SimpleFeed was going ape-shit-crazy by making new nodes for items that already existed. When it was done, after some neglect, it had made over 35K feed items for, perhaps, a couple hundred. Fixed, updated, and setup again. We’ll see what happens…

I have these names at my disposal to use for the name of the site, so before tons of links are made to the it, which one sounds best? Write-ins make a comment below.

Make an account and login to vote (it’s quick and you can use the login immediately).

After a day’s work, the new theme is now default for everyone … and I can finally go to bed.

• Wider. This gives a larger content area. It used to be 780px for those using 800×600 screens (an iBook in lower resolution) but as times have changed since I made that decision, I’ve moved to a 900px wide layout.
• Firefox friendly. I know FF handles fewer CSS attributes than Safari (sad, but true) so I’ve moved away from the simple rgba() command to using opacity on background elements to do the nifty fades Safari showed and FF didn’t. The drop shadows are still only in Safari.
• Nicer graphics. The rotating title banner now uses my own photos rather than the old stock photos I found years ago. Yay.
• Highlighted responses in comments. The theme knows me by name. When I respond in comments, it’ll highlight. Especially helpful in the forums or support requests.

Whaddya think?