{"id":26,"date":"2012-09-05T06:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-05T06:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/udid-it-350k-hits-on-a-little-server-in-less"},"modified":"2012-09-05T06:08:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-05T06:08:00","slug":"udid-it-350k-hits-on-a-little-server-in-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"Udid it… 350K hits on a little server in less than 24h"},"content":{"rendered":"

I work at night.  Late.  Lately, all night.  More or less… hacking away in the complete peace and quiet.  And I periodically check Hacker News<\/a> – and sometimes, like yesterday morning I submit something.  #antisec had gotten ahold of 12 million iphone UDID’s and released a million of them out into the wild<\/a>. I immediately followed their excellent instructions on checking and downloading the archive and checked to see if my UDID was in there.  It wasn’t.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/div>\n

<\/a>It then struck me that others might want to do the same thing… so I put up a truly crappy page<\/a> along with a 12 line php script<\/a>, threw it up on a currently unused domain (kimosabe.net) and submitted it to Hacker News as a quick check.<\/p>\n

I had spent a long time trying to work out a sensible and efficient architecture for use on cheap VPS boxes.  Xen for virtualization – because you’re guaranteed an amount of memory and it’s tough for VPS providers to oversell Xen boxes, Ubuntu<\/a> which I love – Natty Narwhal,  and I ended up using Lighttpd<\/a> for the web server.  It supposed to be light and efficient, and it is.<\/p>\n

The second important decision was using  php5-fpm<\/a> – what I really like is that each virtual host can run as its own userID – so if anything bad happened, it would limit the damage, not to mention the speed.<\/p>\n

The hits started coming immediately… uh oh.  First thing to do – backup everything just in case the server blows up… done.  Then I watched as my entry hit the top of Hacker News, hit Slashdot, NBC news, FOX news, Le Figaro… holy crap.<\/p>\n

Then it happened.<\/p>\n

Nothing.  The server didn’t break a sweat.  The load average may have gone over 1 once… as of now, over 350K hits on a server I pay $15 a month for from Empire Hosting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think the combination of Lighttpd+php5-fpm is underappreciated…<\/p>\n

Of course the question of what to do with all this traffic?  Leverage it!  Nope.  That’s not the point.  I had to put a link to some of my details up when someone (wisely) thought that this might just be a UDID sucker… other than that, my wife is a writer of literary crime fiction and she was jealous^H^H^H^H^H^H^H upset that her blog got so few hits… so I added a link… interesting side effect, 1% of the incoming traffic did visit Bunny Island<\/a>…<\/p>\n

The lesson is really simple.  Make it work, put it out.  You can make it pretty later, maybe.<\/p>\n

That was a trip… thanks HackerNews.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I work at night. Late. Lately, all night. More or less… hacking away in the complete peace and quiet. And I periodically check Hacker News – and sometimes, like yesterday morning I submit something. #antisec had gotten ahold of 12 million iphone…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,6,10,11,14,19,23,31],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antisec","tag-bunnyisland","tag-hackernews","tag-hn","tag-lighttpd","tag-massiveload","tag-php5fpm","tag-udid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}