Sorry for the lack of posts this week. The spammers have unleashed a botnet that is hitting blogs, forums, and email servers constantly trying to get spam through and unfortunately we’re one of their many targets. While my spam filters are doing a yeoman’s job scanning and rejecting the spam, the sheer volume of hits is bringing the server to it’s knees. More memory is on the way to help things along, but it’s been a fight. It’s amazing to watch the logs as dozens of computers hit the same file (post comment) within 5 seconds of each other. I’ve had sites I run get Slashdotted and Dugg and the server did fine, but this spam flood is making it scream for mercy. It’s one thing when 50,000 visitors hit your site to view content over the course of, say, 12 hours. Quite another when 500 hit your site, running CPU intensive comment and spam scanning code within 5 seconds.

Anyway, I’ve had to clamp way down on the web server, so during a spam flood you might get a ‘Server Too Busy’ message – just try again, you’ll get through. The new memory should let me loosen the reins a bit more. The next step may be CPU upgrades (it’s a Dual Opteron server – you’d think it could handle a few small traffic sites! 😉 )
I refuse to concede defeat to these losers.

Some of you may suggest turning comments off – I absolutely refuse to do that. One of the best parts about running this site is the comment conversations and debates you get to have with readers.

On a more positive note, we got invited to be part of BlogBurst the other day so that’s pretty cool. We’ll see if anything posted here gets pickup up.

The battle continues…