Cloudflare (Please Read)

[David L]

It's just a question of sitting it out. If you're seeing similar problems, I recommend the same approach: a provisional interim strategy of calculated inaction. It often served me well in my career.

[Slim]

The Cloudflare implementation has been very successful.

None of the bots listed in the image in the post at the top of the thread has been able to visit the site since I set it up, except for GoogleBot which is lightweight and useful (so I whitelisted it).

Static assets like avatar images and stylesheets are now cached on Cloudflare's edge servers which is also saving me a lot of bandwidth. So for example when someone views an avatar image in their browser, the next person in the same region will get it from Cloudflare if it's not in their own browser cache.

We're using less than half the pre-Cloudflare bandwidth even though I've made the site viewable to guests again.

The site is now served over SSL. And I get loads of analytics and graphs to look at when I'm bored.

Free (for a small number of sites), no ads. Really impressive.

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/

[Thenop]

Been having some issues getting onto the site this morning. Say as of 10:30 (my time). This is what I saw:
Highslide Image Viewer

Was for different devices the same.
Seems to be working again now.

[Fishy]

Yep I had same.. back now

[Slim]

Yes, sorry about that - had to reboot the server. I'll have a look through the logs later and see if I can work out what's wrong. I will upgrade the server to one with more resources some time in the next few weeks, I suspect it was hosed on memory.

[Slim]

It did indeed run out of memory (and swap). I've added a second swap file which should prevent it happening again.

Swapping is when the OS moves infrequently used memory pages out of RAM and onto "swap space" to free RAM. A fallback mechanism. A way to give the system more RAM than it actually has, in a virtual way. It's not ideal because disk is much slower than RAM, but it will prevent a crash.

root@ip-172-26-3-246:~# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache  available
Mem:            929        523          64          52        341        189
Swap:          3071        147        2924
root@ip-172-26-3-246:~# swapon -s
Filename                Type        Size    Used    Priority
/swapfile                                  file        1048572    151296    -2
/swapfile2                                 file        2097148    0         -3
root@ip-172-26-3-246:~#

[Thenop]

This is why you wear the crown.

Thanks.

[Slim]

Ah the crown .. you know that's meant tongue in cheek. In a TNMS post years ago, just having a laugh, I referred to myself as "Rush fan royalty".