Recent site pageload times Sept 2023 FIXED

[matthew1]

EDIT
This is fixed. Please jump to this for details.
/EDIT


Thanks to all of you who email/text me letting me know of problems. Chances are good I don't know about a site speed issue, so don't hesitate.

if you'd like my phone number, use the MVS Contact page, which emails me, and we can then trade phone numbers. Or just stay on email, either way. Makes no difference who you are, just reach out to me and let's say Hi.

Site speed: it's been bad lately and I'm working on improving it. As it stands, I have a script running for about 10 hours adding spam/malware/bad bots IP addresses to a list on my server that it checks before sending a page to the requester. That functionality is called iptables.

I'm doing that because my running theory on site slowness is that this server is getting hammered with junk requests from wherever. If you've noticed the Number of Users Online is up in the 2000s or 3000s. There are not that many users, real users. Google Analytics tells me so.

So what are those extra "ghost" users? Some sort of weak but constant flood of junk page requests. That's my theory. I'll update with more info as I progress.

[matthew1]

... and... ahem... the disk is full























Who runs this place?? Full disk is like a 4th-grader thing.

[FireFox31]

Thanks for your work on the site. Pages were loading slowly on my desktop 9/29/23 at 1 am EST. By 9:30 am, they were fast on my phone. Disk full message appeared at 9:30 am between successful page loads.

The iptables script reminds me of a trick on Windows which I believe came from Unix/Linux. There's a file on the system where you can type IP and domain names to simply never connect to. The networking software looks there first before trying to make connections, ignoring anything blacklisted there. It's a fast way to block things.

[matthew1]

I remember that file. I used it often at work 2003-2006 when I was a dev on a PC.

[matthew1]

The spikes happen at night. Let's see what happens tonight.

Screenshot 2023-09-29 at 3.50.59 PM.jpg (47.6 KiB) Viewed 213 times

[matthew1]

I'm going to increase the size of the disk, but I'll need to shut down the site for about 10 minutes. I'm not going to do that now, but I will let you know when that's going to happen. Probably later tonight.

[matthew1]

This is (no jinx no jinx no jinx) fixed. Please read this all the way through.

Don't thank me, please thank Mario Đanić. He's a Croat who used to own a hosting company on which MVS was hosted circa 2010-2011. That's how I met him.

Every year or two I have a problem with the MVS server that I can't find a solution to, and I email him, and he helps absolutely fixes it 100%.

The problem is twofold: he doesn't tell me what was wrong, and he doesn't take payment. I've tried to pay him many times over the years. It's not possible. As far as not telling me what he did and what the source problem was, I think that's possibly because he wants me to poke around in the Debian Linux config files to see what he did, and thus learn. Very noble.

If you're thinking he's a Man of Few Words, yes, he's the man of the fewest words. His English is ok; it's not that.

SO, please help me thank him by thanking him:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariodanic/ ... bdomain=hr
https://twitter.com/mdjanic?lang=en


My Twitter thread:

[matthew1]

Final report. MVS has been fixed for a week, so this is (95%ish) apples-apples.

Screenshot 2023-10-12 at 2.22.08 PM.jpg (52.91 KiB) Viewed 150 times

The ol girl was getting almost a million requests a day.