TOPIC:

Hi,

For the last few weeks the back end of Ridgewoodtoastmasters.org has been SUPER slow. To the point that 5 mins can pass between clicking and getting a response - if I get a response at all.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Carol

We have gone through several things happening within the same time frame... a perfect storm.

First, we updated our spam filter software but it was not tuned just right and was killing the server. We think we have that corrected.

Then, we discovered we were getting hammered by a badly behaved web scanning crawler that has a bad reputation--we think this one scans websites looking for email addresses to put in spam mailing lists. We think we have that properly blocked, but we are continuing to keep an eye on it as well as other potential problem web crawlers.

Lastly, we are continuing to grow ... many more clubs are using FTH now, and with the recent officer turnover, many clubs are updating their websites around the same timeframe. This is all with the same server as we have been using since FTH2 was released.

We are continuing to look at how we can make the server work more efficiently. I apologize for the problems. I assure you we are committed to making everything work smoothly.

Hello,

Once site is fixed please update us back. Thnx and hope you can fix it quicker.

BR
Ramesh

Being targeted by ill behaved search engines and traffic generators is not something we can fix, we can put up barriers to prevent them once they are identified.

Thank you for all of your efforts! It is a great site that even I have been able to update!

Hi,

Site is on and off works. I'm wonder are the any way to fix it permanent basis ?

If we can avoid including emails on the site on plan text we can prevent phishing, spamming to some extent.

Anyway it is very important to get site running.

Thanks

FTZ

FREEToastHost is managed by fellow volunteer toastmasters, they are not paid for their time and donate their time as they can. We do the best we can with the resources we have. There are banks and large corporation with large paid staffs fighting the same attacks we are. You will just have to have patience while we work to eliminate all the the attacks.

Hi Brian,

Yes I understand that and no one can prevent 100% from the attacks. This is why need to have more rules on the site. For a example on our site I noticed there are lot of email address are published and I have taken off most of those. Hence most of attacks are none-human therefore it is very import to have proper content on all sites too. Further I was improving our site and then only we uncounted this issue. Thanks in advance.

Yes, but you have to understand that while you are doing things for your particular website, we are addressing things at the level of the entire system.

For example, during the last week both Brian and I have taken specific measures to limit the impact of web crawlers on the performance of the system. Brian implemented targeted server blocks and I implemented a blocking scheme in the index.cgi script that *everyone* runs to access their website. I also took a gamble and posted all of the urls in the system on one crawler's website that claimed they would remove them from their crawler processing. (That gamble seems to have paid off.) Brian also did a good bit of work over the *weekend* to speed up the system.

While there are certainly things you can do for a specific website, frequently these things we are dealing with are rather systemic in nature and require us to look at them from the system level.

However, here are some specifics that any admin can do on their website:

1. Limit number of photos and other *referenced* content on home page--references take time to get resolved. Break up your home page in to custom pages that are linked to your home page. (This also creates new references, but these will likely be faster than keeping a lot of content on your home page.) You have to look a the speed of your website loading with an *empty cache*... that is what is important to a prospective new visitor that has not been on your website before. (they will have an empty cache)

2. Hunt for and fix/delete broken links and <img> tags and other types of bad references. These *kill* website performance. This is a type of housekeeping that is *very* important for admins to do regularly.

3. Use PNG images -- they have good compression.

4. Use images that are at the size you really need as opposed to having the browser scale them on the fly. Percentage dimensions are scaled.

5. If you use a lot of repetitive intensive page formatting, then create/implement CSS rules if you know how to do that.

The email stuff you mention is important, also, but will not impact website performance as much as 1-5 above.