To avoid issues with spam, I have decided to delete some old and outstanding forum user accounts.

These were accounts that either had not been activated (through e-mail) or were registered last year and had zero posts associated.

Either way, if you want an account, please feel free to register but don't forget to activate it. :)

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I was taking a look at the bandwidth graphs the other day and noticed an unusually large amount of traffic coming out of the server. After looking into it further, I've determined that many people are refreshing the same feed over and over again. Instead of limiting retardedly programmed clients, I implemented the following change that should leave no one in the dark.

Effective immediately, the fastest you will be allowed to refresh a feed is 5 minutes. After doing some statistics on the TV show data, the prime-time average time between releases is 15 minutes. So this is very generous.

Here's some interesting data that I pulled from the logs (normally I don't log):

  16086 82.208.x.x
  20828 82.165.x.x
  21965 76.252.x.x
  24211 65.214.x.x
  24878 76.247.x.x
  28262 78.86.x.x
  29188 218.186.x.x
  34564 81.231.x.x
  37378 209.85.x.x
  97263 70.187.x.x
 257906 69.225.x.x

The first number being the number of hits per day. The last entry is the most amusing.

So, if you see a bunch of entries that say "You are refreshing this feed too fast. Please adjust your client's settings." in your RSS program, you probably need to adjust your client's settings.

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So with the recent press about tvRSS and some major torrent repositories going down, I've noticed higher than usual traffic on the server. The server load is still around (usually less than) 1, which implies there is very much room to grow. The problem I have is with configurations.

Lately I've been experimenting with Lighttpd and how it dispatches FastCGI processes to PHP. Unfortunately this is not so straight forward. Some users were reporting receiving HTTP error 500 and according to the error log it was due to there not being enough FastCGI processes to cope with the amount of requests. I think I resolved that issue. The next thing is MySQL. I was concerned that the default configuration would not handle this amount of requests either, so I specified max-connections to 2000 (just some arbitrary number I made up). Then, yesterday, I had problems with MySQL. Right now there is no max-connections specified in MySQL and I know there aren't 2000 connections going on, so something is a little odd.

I'll do my best to resolve the problems in a timely manner, but if you do see some weird error, try again in a few seconds and please try to contact me to let me know.

Thanks!

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It was just brought to my attention that this website was recently featured on the tech-geek news outlet Slashdot.

No changes have been made to this website as a result of any higher than usual traffic. I'm fairly confident that the website will handle this "surge" of traffic well -- it's very light on the server. Please make yourselves at home.

If you have some questions regarding this site, and what it's all about, please feel free to contact me. Also check the forums as your question may have already been answered.

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If you're reading this, the IP address change was completed successfully and your DNS records have automatically updated. Please stay tuned, as always, for future updates.

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Sorry for the last minute notice, but I have just been notified that the IP for tvRSS will be changing again. I will do what I can to make the changes to DNS first, to minimize downtime. I don't have any details on the new IP address yet.

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First I realized that the VTV feed was no longer being updated. Unbeknownst to me, the source for this information had a completely different layout schema. When I adjusted the data source, it semi-worked excep tthe titles were screwed up. Everything was lower-case and often times entries were blank because the release information wasn't being processed correctly. I got creative and used a different method, so there may be some duplicates to the VTV feed, but this will improve quality later on and should not effect search-based feeds for particular shows, because the lower-case show names wouldn't show up anyway.

To sum up, the VTV feed is now working again. Please let me know if there are any issues.

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Starting at about 12:30 PM PDT on Sunday, April (NOT AUGUST, OK?) 29th 2007, tvrss.net was unreachable for almost six hours. Cogent acknowledged the incident and sent out a technician almost immediately. The downtime was caused by a switch whose power supply malfunctioned. A replacement was brought in within a few hours. Considering the time of the event (Sunday afternoon) the response was adequate. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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I blocked the first IP ever today. This is somewhat of a milestone, because I've never ever done it before, nor have I ever needed to. The following user, for whatever reason, has decided that it is alright to send, on average, six requests per second to the following set of URLs. Since there are eight URLs, there are nearly 50 requests a second from this user alone!

The number in the front  of the IP address is the number of times the URL was accessed in a 1 hour window between 8:00 pm and 9:00 pm PDT on April 12, 2007.

  21919 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Shark&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  22454 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Numb3rs&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  22939 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=CSI&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  22939 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Veronica+Mars&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  22981 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Jericho&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  23100 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Heroes&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  23254 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Lost&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"
  25378 71.202.49.xxx "GET /search/index.php?show_name=Penn+&+Teller:+Bullshit!&show_name_exact=true&mode=rss HTTP/1.1"

I hate to say this, but this kind of activity just is not allowed and any similar activity will be handled accordingly. This user is sent to a static text document explaining what happened.

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If any of you are experiencing website issues, that is, if you randomly get an error "500 Internal Server Error" then please, don't be alarmed. I'm aware of the issue. Lighttpd and PHP have been struggling to keep up with the load on the server lately. I'm not sure why, but I am looking into the issue. In addition, I may also be trying a few configs here and there to try and alleviate the problem. If you experience any issues at all, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Also, if anyone has experience using lighttpd and fastcgi/php in extremely high load environments, please contact me.

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