So after yesterday’s post and having seen mod_access_dnsbl (which I still haven’t tried to be honest), I decided to move to Apache instead of lighty.
The reason for this is that lighttpd makes it very cumbersome to add new redirects every time that a site has a broken link to my blog, like OSGalaxy, and it also had a few quirks that started to look awful to me. Also, it was not much able to deal with high load, and spammers got me a lot of high loads lately, yesterday I found the server’s load at more than 60, which is not good.
Now, I know that the problem here was mostly in Typo itself and the fact that it has some crazy stuff, but still, Apache is helping with the situation here, with some things that lighttpd I couldn’t get to properly do.
For instance, the redirection of the huge list of articles that are linked around with the wrong names is now done through a RewriteMap hosted on a berkdb file, which should make lookup much faster. Also, mod_negotiation will allow proper image choice for various browsers together with MultiViews. The whole stuff of redirection that lighty was doing is now replaced by a series of RewriteRules.
And of course Typo is now served through Passenger.
Still there are a few issues left, I haven’t been able to make Bugzilla work with mod_perl for instance. But it’s there at least; and hopefully this way I’ll be able soonish to have it available on HTTPS rather than plain HTTP.
Anyway, I’ve left lighttpd configured so if something does not seem to work properly, I’ll just switch back and look for new solutions.
Hmm seems like I had some trouble with my rewrite rules and the feeds, it should be fixed now. On the other hand, it’s also using MultiViews now to provide most negotiated content, which is probably a plus side, if only news readers where to properly provide Accept-Content they could just get http://blog.flameeyes.eu/ar… to get their preferred feed of choice.I have to thank again Google Webmaster Tools to tell me about the issue though.
I also had some problems with comments it seems, I hope not too many people tried to comment here today :/
Let’s see if it works now with dnsbl enabled.
I’m handling getting on the front page of /. with a 512MB RAM Linode.com account with ease at this very moment (5% cpu load). Configuration is essentially Gentoo, Apache, PHP, APC, MySQL (w/built in query cache), and WordPress – nothing fancy and I didn’t even have to resort to tricks yet such as making the blog entries static with WP-supercache or using memcached.Apache has received some unnecessary bad rap and is well suited for most sites if properly configured. Granted, HTTP download servers and image servers are probably best served by Varnish HTTP accelerator with Apache/Tomcat/etc doing the dynamic work on very large scale sites, but these are corner cases.I would recommend Akismet as well. This is standard for WordPress and ported to many other web apps and really works wonders on spam.I’m not a big fan of Ruby/rails (Python does everything just as well), but Passenger makes it palatable from the admin’s standpoint.