Performance Trouble

[seraph0x]

Hey guys,

Bad news. For some reason quite a few people have recently decided that it would be a good idea to use a page grabber to download this site as a whole. With close to a thousand webteases (regular and classics) on offer, this had enough impact to almost kill the server.

There is not much I can do. The site is privately financed (i.e. by me) right now and for tax reasons I can't just start making money with it without doing way more paperwork that I just haven't got the time for.

I also can't really ban those people because that would start a race of them trying to sneak in and me trying to keep them out that I'm bound to lose.

So, please don't use page grabbers for the time being. We will try to find a more permanent solution to increase performance, but that will take a few days.

Thanks!

Seraph0x

PS: Why the hell would you wanna download the site anyway? Were not going anywhere, we'll always be here and always be free.

[Owen]

From owning my own server.. I can agree that it's annoying as hell. I think you made the right decision to not ban them considering what you said. I hope you can work things out and keep these people from page grabbing any more than they already are/were.

[bondageslave36]

Sucks for the rest of us.

[jackie20]

What about making a downloadabel file containing the teases. The people who wants to rip the site probelly only have net at work or something like that. This way they could dl say a 100 teases at the time and not put the same pressure on the server.

[quorr777]

Is this anything like Faster-Fox on Firefox which speeds up downloads?

Like most enlightened people I use Firefox and the Faster-Fox add on. They do say it places a strain on some servers! Naturally if this were a problem for the site I could disable it as I like all of us here will do everything we can to support this wonderful site!

seraph0x you are the best, by the way...

[seraph0x]

Regarding the no ban policy. I kinda made an exception yesterday. Our server allows 30 connections at a time and 20 were taken up by one moron, so I sorta banned him for a couple of hours. I mean you can really overdo it.

As for tease download packages: No. Packing the teases costs lots of CPU, storing the archives costs gigabytes of storage. We might offer this in the future, but for now it isn't viable, sorry.

Faster-Fox is perfectly fine.

Now for the people who - as jackie pointed out - have a very, very good reason why they absolutely, positively need to download all teases. Please at least follow these guidelines:
- Make sure your client doesn't use more than two simultaneous connections.
- Try to run it when the server load is low (that is between 8am - 12am GMT)
- Make sure you only download what you really need (i.e. if you want the teases add a filter for /webteases/ and /timg/ so you don't grab the whole wiki by accident)

If in doubt, you can always contact me and I'll give you tips and sanction your downloading project.

seraph0x you are the best, by the way...

Thanks, but don't forget: The community is what drives this site, my job is merely not to annoy you too much.

[Owen]

You are doing that well seraph0x.

At this time, there is only one fix I could recommend. When I login(or anyone I assume).. it takes me to a "Does Not Exist" type of page. This is because it does not add www. to the address bar for some reason. To fix it, I must manually add www. to the address bar. I suggest you look into fixing this, as it may deter many users trying to login, post teases or even join.

If you need help fixing it, let me know.

[seraph0x]

Yep, just noticed that this morning. It's fixed now.

But if anyone has tips on how to kill fruit flies, let me know. These beasts are driving me crazy.

[dark]

Be fast

[seraph0x]

Be fast

Exactly my approach. Right now I see it as a kind of martial arts excercise.

[jackie20]

ouch. I don't remember saying it quite like that

I just thought it would be a nice sevice. Esp since nobody has cared to make the "to do at the office"-tease

And the flies... speed IS of the essence but If you don't want to kong fu fight them all year you should throw away your old beer bottles and stuff like that. They need water or beer or something like that for a few days to develope from eggs.
Thats gotta be the first household tip at this page

[punkrngd]

speaking of fruit flies.. last week i was at a meeting and i caught a fly with my hands and said "13 years of martial arts training... about time i caught a damn fly!" needless to say we had a laugh