The MacDeskBlog

From: Brian David <aurora5500@hotmail.com>
Subject: server feedback
Date: November 22, 2005 12:48:49 PM PST
To: feedback at macdesktops.com

Your site sux ass and you cant load any pages unless you want to wait hours. You suck, your site sucks, AND APPLE SUCKS ASS…oh and so do homo gay fags.

FUCK APPLE!!!

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I cut over serving of the pictures to a new server provided by ImportGSM. So far, performance seems to be noticeably improved. Pages are still being served over the DSL line for the time being, though they too will transition in the not too distant future. Until then, site performance should be pretty good for most users. Accessing large categories will still be a bit slow, though not nearly as bad as it has been for the past several weeks.

Please join me in thanking Eric at ImportGSM.

Thank you, also, to everyone else who has offered assistance through this difficult period.

Someone must have hit a power pole near the house, as our power was out for a few hours this evening. The servers and DSL line went down as a result. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I tried turning on Performance caching a week or two ago. What a disaster. MacDesktops content is simply not compatible with performance caching. I tried to turn it back off again a couple of days into the experiment, but it appears that if any domain name has it turned on, then all domains are affected by it. Or maybe changing the setting within the Server Admin (Tiger Server) application just doesn’t change the setting to the webperfcache application on the fly.

Anyway, I managed to kill webperfcache today, and the server load dropped immediately from about 20 to about 6. It’s down below 3 now that we’re well outside of peak hours. My apologies for taking the site offline for a several minutes during that process. I hope that this will translate into an improved user experience. MacDesktops is still being served over those two unimpressive DSL connections, so performance won’t improve tremendously, regardless. But it should get at least a bit better.

I am in talks with a few different companies about hosting and hope to get that resolved very soon. Cross your fingers.

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who has sent in suggestions of hosting companies, offers of servers and bandwidth, or simply notes of support.

Second, I want to assure you that MacDesktops WILL get a much better connection soon. I don’t know exactly how soon yet, but soon. Hopefully a matter of weeks.

I am currently in negotiations with a manufacturer of a product I rather like for them to host MacDesktops in return for cross-promotional consideration. If my current negotiations fall through, I will pursue one or more of the other offers and recommendations which look most promising.

I’m sure some of you are curious just how big MacDesktops is at this point. Here are a few stats:
1. contains over 10GB of pictures
2. daily web server log consumes over 150MB
3. served 525GB of data in September (according to GoDaddy, may they go down in flames)
4. served 640GB of data in October (according to GoDaddy, may they go down in flames)
5. the entire archive is currently served off of two servers using round robin DNS to share the server load for the pictures.
6. November traffic is waaaay down, for obvious reasons.

There is a phisher or viral attack which is masquerading as MacDesktops. There is no “Support Team” at MacDesktops; there’s just me. The attachment probably contains a virus or spyware or something nasty. Don’t open it. Email addresses used for announcements are secure and have not been compromised. In fact, the address I received this at isn’t even on the announcement list. I suspect messages similar to this are being sent using other domains as well.

I just want to assure you that the message was NOT sent by MacDesktops. Do NOT open the attachment.

From: service@macdesktops.com
Subject: MEMBERS SUPPORT
Date: November 2, 2005 9:22:51 AM PST
To:

Dear Macdesktops Member,

Your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of unsolicited spam messages during the recent week. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and confirm the attached document so you will not run into any future problems with the online service.

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to cancel your membership.

Virtually yours,
The Macdesktops Support Team

+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Macdesktops Antivirus – www.macdesktops.com