Entries with tag "spam"

Over the past year or so I've noticed BinRock getting slower and slower. It got so bad that visitors' web browsers were timing out before BinRock got around to sending them the page they were waiting for. I don't get any notification when a visitor times out, but for the last few months, I've been getting 5-10 error messages a day from my own scripts that load BinRock pages for one reason or another, and I can extrapolate from that and guess that it's been quite a lot.

In Linux, there's a measure of how heavily the machine is loaded, aptly called the "load average." A value between 0.0 and 1.0 means that the machine is only partially being used, and it's spending part of its time idle. A value of 1.0 effectively means that there is something using the CPU at all times, but nothing is being made to wait. That's just about perfect — you're not wasting hardware sitting around doing nothing, but you're also not overloading it. Values above 1.0 mean that the machine is overloaded, and processes are having to sit around waiting for their turn to run. Generally, if you see it reach 2.0 or more, the machine will be running pretty slowly and it'll be really obvious to the users.

For years, BinRock's load average was down around 0.10 — it wasn't even breaking a sweat serving all the web sites, email accounts, etc that are hosted there. But for the last year, the load has started growing steadily, and during the last few months, I'd regularly see it get as high as an astounding 30.0. Hence all the timeouts.

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In Ray Romano's book, Everything And A Kite, he says that, when he's trying to stay awake on long drives, he tries to think up sentences that have never ever been uttered before, such as, "Give me back my fudge suitcase, emperor." I think I may have just found another one.

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Bah, the comment spammers seem to have discovered my site. I've gotten about 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. In frustration I wrote up a quick captcha feature for my comment submission form (Captchas are those images with the distorted text that you type in to prove you're a human), but now I'm not sure if I should use it. That puts the burden and inconvenience of preventing spam on the users, rather than on me, and that's not fair. Maybe I should just keep deleting them manually. Of course, 702 of the 891 comments on the site were left by users with BinRock accounts, so I guess I could just require captchas from anonymous users. That might be a good compromise.