You're Site Is Now Even Slower Than I Remembered!

Just my 3 cents worth.

 

When I first joined your site it was blazingly fast. After a period

of time it began to slow and sloooow and slooooooooow until I

couldn't stand it anymore. I'm sure it was due to an amazing amount

of business. Now I return a year or so later and it's even WORSE!

Sometimes the site just locks up and I have to close the browser to

get out. I would think with the amount of people and fantastic photos

you have on here that you would be concerned about losing some of

them. Remember.... the only thing you have to offer is "service" and

I would bet there are people just waiting in the wings for you to

stumble so they can supply an alternative.

 

Anyway, the site is wonderful but the speed is pretty stinky!<div></div>

With dialup; the swings in speed are tempered; low pass filtered. Certain times of the day do bog; as folks load up the server with their photos.

There are ways of making constructive suggestions to folks - people who work hard to

provide a service - without coming across as a completely juvenile asshole. This post is

not one of those ways.

Greg it would be very difficult for another site to supply a true alternative. Sure it is probably easy to set up another site that could accumulate good photos in relatively short order. Maybe even making it easier to rate and crit photos. But there is a wealth of information here in the archives related to everything concerning photography from knowledgeable people that would take 10 years to duplicate. <p> Also telling the powers that be that the site might be operating slowly at a given time is something they already know since they constantly use it and I'm sure more frustrated than we are.

I am indeed frustrated! Brian is working on making things better, but it's tough.

 

In the last few days we've seen what could well be denial of service attacks which have been slowing things down. They are being blocked, tracked and dealt with as we speak. Action will be taken when the individual(s) involved are identified.

What actually is a "denial of service attack"? I often see the term mentioned but have no idea what it is and how it works. TIA

DOS is where somebody send so many requests to a website that it slows it down or stops it. If any system gets 10,000 or 100,000 simultaneous requests for service, it will slow down or stop. Even Microsoft could be brought to it's knees this way. The SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) website was taken off line for several days by DOS attacks from hackers who didn't like their software policies.

 

This is a highly illegal activity, with large fines and jail terms for anyone found responsible. So if you're going to do this you'd better know what you're doing or you may find youself being best pals and bunkmates with a guy named "bubba" for quite a while, as well as forfiting most of your worldly possessions. This isn't a civil matter, it's a criminal matter and the Feds take it pretty seriously.

 

However it's sometimes tricky to tell the difference between DOS attacks and dumb webbots or spiders gone wrong. Any program which automatically fires off requests to a website as fast as it possibly can is a problem. There are software solutions at the server end to deal with these things of course, but sometimes they can also interfere with legitimate website access. Responsible and well written webbots and spiders limit themselves to no more than a few requests per second, and that isn't a problem. Badly written or configured software might not limit the request frequency.

A denial of service attack is where somebody floods a server with a huge number of requests so that it fails under the load. The name comes from the idea that the server is so busy servicing requests from the attacker that service is denied to everybody else.

 

The incident on Monday was definitely a denial of service attack. It consisted of requesting Bob Atkins' and Marc G's Community Member pages several thousand times in the course of about an hour, plus a few hundred times on an apparently random hundred or so other member pages. At the peak of it, the requests were coming at the rate of several dozen per second. It was clearly launched by somebody familiar with the site, who has read some of my comments about Community Member pages being expensive to compute.

 

All of these requests came from Lynx browsers on two particular IP addresses in Spain. The other 40,000 hits that I initially thought were part of the attack were probably innocent requests from other IP's within the same IP address block.

Bob / Brian, fascinating, many thanks. Hope you find those responsible.

Hopefully these people will be caught and recieve a DOF- Denial of Freedom

They probably picked my page because I have more posts on the site than just about anyone else and so retrieving them all would be a bigger load on the system. Brian has my full permission to disable my community page for as long as is required. I never read it and I don't think any other user will really miss it!