Wiki is offline

Wiki is offline

Old forum URL: forums.lhotka.net/forums/t/6047.aspx


RockfordLhotka posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Many of you may have noticed that www.lhotka.net has been very sluggish for the past several days.

I have discovered that troubleshooting performance issues on a web server is a real challenge. Especially when I haven't changed anything in a long time, and so had no clues about where to look.

IIS has terrible (no?) tools for figuring out which virtual directory or page is consuming all your CPU. And that's exactly what was happening - IIS was consuming 100% of the CPU constantly.

So I did what I could, and eventually started turning off anonymous access to each vdir, one at a time. Eventually I turned off the right one, and the CPU dropped to normal levels. It was the wiki.

Now I have looked through the wiki logs, and discovered that it was not used hardly at all by the community, but in the past week it seems that some spammer wrote a script to flood it with spam. And it seems that flexwiki (the software I was using) gets insanely slow if a single page has a bajillion edits. And this evil person's script did tend to pick on just 2-3 pages to edit over and over and over and...

So the wiki is offline, probably permanently. As a tool it never became very useful, and as a time-sink for me it is simply not worth the effort.

As for describing the person as "evil", I choose that word with knowledge of its true meaning and implication for the soul in numerous religions now and through history. May he have the opportunity to visit all the various permutations that should result - but I particularly hope Hades grabs him and forces him to trace IIS performance issues, and as soon as he solves the issue the server (and his knowledge of the problem) is reset to nothing, so he must repeat this process infinitely. Just like a certain man, a stone and a hill.

JoeFallon1 replied on Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Glad you found the problem Sisyphus. <g>

Joe

 

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