Category: Website news

Searching for the perfect speed

Magnetic_dudCoding

Since I got the crazy idea to radically change this website engine, from Windows+mojoPortal to Linux+PHP, I noticed that I need a LOT of more CPU time to generate each page:

cpu-year

It uses a lot of processor time, but requests are much more faster… if the page has been “cached”:

http_loadtime-year

In my experiments I saw that the forum that I was using (bbpress) slows down the site a lot: it loads a lot of useless javascript in all pages, and doesn’t allow “caching” the pages. So I temporarily disabled the forum, searching for a temporary solution. I’m thinking to use Discourse

The old website wasn’t accessible for over two weeks

Magnetic_dudWebsite news

Today is a slow day at work (customers and suppliers are both in holiday!, so I told myself “let’s manually transfer some content from the old website!”

I go to open it:

Huh? Why it doesn’t work?

I got a new server and I forgot to update the IP address! I fix it:

Huh? Again? I also forgot to configure the new server 😳

Moreover, I can’t configure it correctly, I tried many setups, but it doesn’t work correctly…

UCBrowser is now banned

Magnetic_dudInternet

Today I went to see my access log report (even if I don’t use Google Analytics, I still have complete access to server logs, and I analyze anomalous patterns) and I found this:

ucbrowser

??? Nobody uses UC Browser outside China!

I go to see visitor log:

ucbrowser2

What happends, suddenly the Naruto karaoke become popular in China? I read more details:

ucbrowser3(Green: IP addresses, pink: device; yellow: browser)

The IP addresses in the log file aren’t the actual ones, they’re from CloudFlare, a proxy between this site and the Internet. The real addresses are for example 14.152.64.xxx (Shenzhen), 123.150.183.xxx (Tianjin), 58.215.183.xxx (Jiangsu).

What can be the odds? Either there are thousands of chinese with a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 interested in Naruto karaoke (but they close the page before reading it), either UCweb is doing a “micro-DDOS” to my server, they need to get that specific page (only that page!!!) every few minutes. They’re not identificating themselves as a bot like Google, Bing and the rest of the world is doing, but they pretend to be a Samsung Galaxy Note 2

I hate this abusive behaviour, so I will redirect every visit from a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with UCBrowser, to ucweb.com

Update 9 september: I thought that banning only Galaxy Note 2 with UC Browser (meaning: only bots) was enough, but they just updated their bot. Ok, so, ANYONE using UC Browser is now banned 😡💢

ucbrowser-basta

New website

Magnetic_dudWebsite news

Good news! This year my company closes for holiday but I can’t afford to go anywhere! That means that during my wonderful staycation I can update this website, since it doesn’t play really well with mobile phones.

Everything it’s still available on the old website, still enabled. If a page it’s on the old website, it’s going to be redirected automatically. When I have time, I will transfer manually all the pages and posts over here

Just for history, the old website was looking like this:

Old Website