For a couple minutes, I just couldn’t figure out why this site had slowed to a crawl. After eliminating more serious potential causes (compromised server, DoS of some sort, etc), and taking a look at the bandwidth graphs, it finally dawned on me. This new server was maxing out its 10mbps port because I had forgotten to install MaxMind’s GeoIP Apache module. Asia was back.

Despite not being updated in years, nor ever promoted, PicVault has a couple thousand dedicated users and signs up a few dozen more a day. That was with all of Asia blocked as it proved the only way to keep tens of thousands of pornographic galleries from being uploaded to and hosted by the service. People everywhere else in the world generally follow the rules.

Without the Apache module providing IP-to-location lookups each time an image is requested, all those requests were going through, and the images served. Somehow some users in Asia realized the site was serving images to their IPs again and uploaded enough to attract more than 10mbps in image downloaders. Naturally, pings spiked and response times slowed to a crawl.

Poor Asia needs to find a new place to host its massive pornography collection. Just goes to show I need a better way of keeping track of all the little tweaks I’ve made to my servers for individual websites.

This may be the last post for a while as I’m heading to Washington to start my job at Microsoft in just a few hours now. My desktop and most of my belongings are on a UPS truck somewhere destined for my future apartment late next week. Hopefully I’ll have internet access before it arrives.