Tag Archive for 'wordpress'

Peak traffic

Published
by
lprent
on November 10, 2008
in admin
. 15 Comments
Sysop

Sysop

Some comments on Sunday about this site performing well induced me to have a look at the traffic over the last week. I was extremely surprised at how much load the system can now take without stalling. From the Wordpress blog stats, It turns out that the traffic for the week was 34.6% higher in page views compared to the week before. It was a staggering 61.9% higher than it was two weeks before. It makes me more confident about running the site at a technical level towards the 2011 (or earlier) election.

I’d love to take credit for this (and I will in part). However the reason people read the site is largely because of the content, both from our posters and our knowledgeable and informed commentators*. This is a completely voluntary site run on a very loose cooperative arrangement - it just shows what kind of talent is there to be tapped from the grass-roots. A special mention for Julie Fairey from The Hand Mirror for her election evening coverage who kept everyone coming back for more. Despite being offline for comments for 19 hours, it is still in our top ten days for traffic.

However that is just the visible portion of the site. We’re reliant on a number of technical supports.

Webfarm also deserves a strong mention. Their systems have been utterly reliable since I moved the site there in Feburary. Currently the site runs on virtual private server with 512MB of RAM running Fedora Linux with unlimited local traffic costing $159+GST per month.

However, my biggest kudo’s has to go to the open source people at Wordpress, Fedora project, K2 theme and the wordpress plugin authors without whom this system would have failed dramatically under the load. The site now runs without any code kludges apart from some css styles for the display. It is quite a different site from what was running last year and failing under load.

* Well almost all commentators - I specifically exclude the annoying, largely incoherent, and definitely anti-social trolls. To a man, they seem to mainly be act supporters** hyped on their badly self-assessed intelligence, in love with their own egos, and who take the credo of individualism to the point of being incapable of meaningful social interaction with others. It is the one area that I pity John Key in - he is going to have to deal with adult versions of these clowns. He also doesn’t have the “send to spam” button. However he has done well with an early ban.

** But not all act supporters are trolls

We’re popular - but with the wrong people

Published
by
lprent
on October 5, 2008
in admin
. 10 Comments

Lynn PrenticeAfter a lot of work both by a few e-mails from people here and by the good services of some people on nz.comp (google seems to be a little behind on the messages) I finally found the link to the malware site that was attached itself to the site footer.

The material that it was trying to introduce to people reading the site may include various forms of backdoors. It would be adviseable to run a good virus scan on your system if you have read the site in the last couple of weeks. Corporate systems shouldn’t have had an issue because the site it was linking to has been a well known chinese malware site for a long time.

The anti-virus/malware scans missed it at the server because it was a new variant of an old problem (the same one I had in march), targeted specifically at wordpress sites using what is evidently is still a open vunerability. My own checking of the site missed it because it had managed to leave all of the file attributes of the file (size, times, etc) exactly the same as the origionals. My attempts to see what people were reporting had failed because it only emitted the malware link out periodically. A dump of the web page at the client side by Stephen Worthington allowed me to see exactly what it was doing.

The vunerability it was exploiting was meant to have been fixed in wordpress 2.5, however they seem to have found another vunerability. The downside of having open source software is that it is possible to read the code looking for holes. I’ve done some things to reduce possible problems, but I now have MD5 hash check of the files running periodically which will fix the problem if it happens again. I’ve also reported the details to wordpress and a couple of other sites.

But there are some very creative people out there writing this stuff, and evidently this site is popular with them.

Lynn