If you’ve tried to post a comment here over the last few days, you would have been disappointed. Over the weekend I came under another massive comment spam attack which brought my server to its knees. I was seeing a server load of over 300 (it should usually be less than 1). Even though I had switched to authenticated commenters only, the sheer number of requests on the comments program was killing the server. So I took pretty drastic action and removed execute permissions from the mt-comments.cgi program. I’ve just turned it back on, but I’ll be watching closely over the next few days and will turn it off again if necessary.
I read something yesterday about this huge server load being caused by a problem with javascript files in MT3.2. But I can’t find the article I was reading now [Update: Kevin (in the comments) points out that the article in question is here]. Apparently this problem is fixed in 3.3. I’ve been considering an upgrade to 3.3 recently and having done a clean installation for a friend recently I like what I’ve seen and I’ll be aiming to upgrade this site as soon as I get back from YAPC::Europe. So hopefully the comment spam issue will get a lot better in ten days or so.
“We apologise for the inconvenience”
MT 3.3 requires minimum Perl version 5.6.1.
Would this be the article in question by chance?
Why don’t you just host your blog somewhere else and let them deal with all the hassle?
Mr.Rehab,
The Perl version is not a problem. I’m running 5.8.6 on this server.
Kevin,
Spot on. That’s the article I meant.
Ian,
I’ve considered that before and I’m currently experimenting with Vox. But I do like having my own site. It gives me far more control – not to mention the income from the Google Ads :)
Actually, the problem was pre-MT3.2. I think it was fixed in MT3.2, if you used default MT3.2 templates and javascript. I had never the templates and therefore was calling the comments.cgi every time a Typekey icon was displayed. Or something like that.