Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..
a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and
b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to download said content).
I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site better when I thought it was designed ironically.
She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.
Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.
"Fun" and "concentration camp" are two words that should never be used in the same context.
> She sells cars for a living; she's not an elite hacker, just a curious one.
Well obviously. I wasn't complaining about her abilities as a hacker though. I was commenting about how I preferred her site when I thought it was a deliberate ploy to go viral.
> Also, being a speaker of British English, she would never design her site 'ironically', because irony in British English precludes intention.
I'm British English too - and few people here know the correct term for "ironic" let alone use it accurately. We've truly adopted Americanised term there. However if you follow "The King's English", then the term simply refers to stating the contrary to what is meant. Since I was referring to her site looking like it was meant to be amaturish but in fact being deliberate, that could be argued as being "ironic". But regardless of it's usage, you're just arguing semantics and thus missing my point entirely.
Not everyone is deathly afraid of dark humour. Stand-up comedy in particular is full of it, yet people still seem to think of it as 'fun'.
The arguing semantics thing was just that, which is why it was marked as an addendum with the 'also'.
Oh I love dark humour, but there are some things we shouldn't trivialise and concentration camps are one of those things (if you had to sit through the same stories I had about your grandparents time in such camps, then I'm sure you'd agree).
And I never get people having a go about stuff like concurrent connections at amateurs, that's completely our fault.
Why can't web servers stop acting like babies that need constant attention with some sort of mystical knowledge to stop them falling over when something new happens? Why is our software so brittle?
Also, most web farms these days are built with multiple nodes that serve ~500 concurrent requests (even multiple VMs performs better than one instance of Linux on the same hardware running bare metal) and load distributed across each node. So a 500 concurrent default is entirely reasonable.
However all of the above is moot because she's running Apache on Debian - which does not default to 500 concurrent connections. That is a setting she's applied herself (or paid someone to set up).
And for the record, I'm all for amateurs rolling their own web servers - I'm certainly not elitist in that regard. But the fact remains that some of this stuff is rather technical, so complaining that it isn't easy is like saying cars should be self-servicing and that we shouldn't need garages and engineers.
And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade. E.g. Eddie is 14 years old (http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html - see the "Quality of Service" section in particular - while Eddie is intended for clustered setups, there are many situations where this approach is amenable even to single server setups) and provides a solution (amongst others) where if the system can't handle the incoming traffic, rather than serving up the main page and choking on assets and failing miserably in serving up anything to anyone, you can serve up a small light "queue" page and grant access to the full site as and when capacity allows.
There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.
No. I do not want my server hardware attempting to guess optimal performance. I'd rather do that myself and know that it's set up correctly.
You wouldn't buy a sports car then moan that it's a manual gear box and lacks cruise control. Just as you wouldn't run an automated tool to master a studio recording before sending the master off for CD pressing. If people want guesswork then don't install professional tools (sane defaults are another issue though - I just object to pro-tools applying guesswork).
> And reasonable queuing behaviour for sites have been possible for well over a decade.
Apache does queue TCP/IP connection requests. "Sorry pages" should be configured on the load balancer rather than HTTP daemon as the whole point of them is to offload the work from the saturated nodes.
> There are certainly plenty of things that truly does require a lot of technical skill to sort out, but a lot of software have poor defaults and lacks relatively straightforward features that would make the out of the box experience tremendously much better for less technical users.
A lot of software does have crap defaults, like how Apache publishes it's version number and the underlying OS by default (the ServerTokens directive). However the examples given (concurrent connections and sorry pages) are not wrong (her concurrent connections is set to a non-default value and sorry pages don't belong on the HTTP daemon because they're supposed to bypass the load)
Parent said "default to automatically adjust" - and I see no reason it shouldn't. You could still manually tweak all you want.
Believe me when I say that I'd welcome such a routine if it was practical as it would save me weeks of my life from load testing and fine tuning. But it just wouldn't work in practice.
[1] Not going to come out and say it couldn't work, but I am skeptical for a good many reasons, some of which you've touched on.
If that was what the parent comments referred to though, then it's still a moot point as Lin was isn't running the default tunings (if her 500 concurrent figure is to be believed), so the issue still falls back on her rather than Apache defaults (which is what this argument started over). Though I guess you could also argue that if Apache did some level of auto-tuning then Lin may not have felt obliged to tamper with the defaults.
The ASCII art in the source code is awesome, BTW.
The ASCII art is actually pretty impressive - which now has me wondering if I was wrong to dismiss her.
I guess this site is proof that there's often a fine line between genius and insanity.
edit: though there's always the 3rd option; she could just be a successful troll.
Oh, wait, I misread. :)
thats a progress to the prior cookie and redirect hell.