Performance Hacks
The following performance hacks are now implemented to improve the involution experience for the kids. Most of these were suggested to me by YSlow and Matt Mullenweg at Wordcamp.
- Installed wp-cache
- Enabled mod_deflate for gzip compressed html, javascript, and css
- Disabled ETags
- Added Expires headers
- Moved CSS to the top of the <head> container
- Removed the AJAX calendar wordpress plugin (this was hammering the database)
The front page now renders in about 1.5 seconds instead of the 4 seconds that it used to take. The next step is to remove all of the little mini icons in the sidebar and replace them with sprites which will reduce the number of HTTP requests from 21 down to 10. Running JSMin on my Javascript probably wouldn’t hurt either.
UPDATE: Apparently, you should only disable ETags if you’re running a server farm. Doing so for a single server installation probably does more harm than good.
Promulence and Cank are Go!
Well, I just got the go-ahead to move two more servers into the colo today. Projected move in date is 12/31. Go web, go! I decided to name the new servers promulence and cank. They will both run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4U2 and serve as backup DNS, MX, HTTP and SQL servers for involution.com and future, undisclosed endeavors.
My Shoes Hurt
We’re now entering the 20th consecutive hour without power in the involution.com colo. It’s kind of weird for the power to be out that long, seeing how frognet, the ISP on which I am hosted, is physically located on Court Street in Athens, Ohio which is the main street for downtown for a city of 20,000 people. What really gets me is that this is the second time in two weeks that power has been out for more than enough time to deplete a massive 1500VA UPS (Thanks 
bumperman). I think Ohio must have suddenly morphed into some kind of weird low-rent are of Calcutta without the low rent. Aren’t we supposed to be the most technologically advanced nation in the world, or does that record only count if we exclude Ohio and Missouri? It’ll be a cold day in hell before I recognize Missouri!
Downtime v1337
Apparently Hurricane Galdavo hit Court Street and knocked power out for my colo for eleventy-three hours. Sorry to all the kids in Liechtenstein who couldn’t view my cacti pictures.
The Nunar Reaper
People keep hammering my sshd with false login requests. I wrote this script which I call nunar_reaper.pl that retaliates against the stupidity in favor of a tarpit. The infamous Dave Dellanave helped out with this one. I still need to fend off imaginary user name attacks, but that’s a little harder.
#!/usr/bin/perl open(TAIL, "tail -f /var/log/secure|"); while() { if(/Failed password for root/) { ($ip) = $_ =~ /(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/; system "iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s $ip -j DROP" } }
Downtime Post-Mortem
Involution.com was down for a bit longer than expected when I moved to the new apartment. I had been hosting my server on an SBC DSL line which was very reliable, but cost a whopping $99 per month. So, when I moved to the new place, I went back to a $35 per month cable modem, but that meant involution.com was homeless.
I decided to move involution.com over to a completely new server. I had been running on Redhat 9 for quite some time, but it has not been officially supported since April 30. So, I made the decision to update to RHEL 4 when it was released in February. So, a lot of the downtime was due to the fact that I had to build a new machine, install Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 on it, port involution.com to the new machine, and ship it off to Ohio. Also, I had to get DNS, Sendmail, Mailman, my Hoyhoy mailing list archive, spamassassin, bogofilter, etc, etc, sorted out as well.
I think it was a good decision though as RHEL 4 is running bind in a chroot jail, uses SELinux, and is way more up to date than my Redhat 9 machine was. So, sorry for the downtime, and excuse the slight glitches as I am still working through some glitches and attempting to clean up some insecure PHP that is lurking around.
Chirp
s,2/8,3/13,;
Involution.com Downtime
The involution.com server will be down from 2/5 to 2/8 whilst my Internet connection is transferred to my new apartment.
Uhhhhhhhh
I moved my web page back-over to the original format, but with the new back-end code. I was thinking that the new format was kind of hard to read. At any rate, I like involution.com the way it is. I doubt I’ll venture into hacking css for the fun of it again.
Done
Well, here it is. Probably a lot of old content could be missing perhaps. I’ll hopefully have some random odds-and-ends that didn’t get moved over ported before September.
