I would actually slide the ad just above the “Stupid Evil Comments” section - it gets a little more coverage on me, since I look to that regularly.

Speaking of that, I just started getting email notifications again. What happened?

Good suggestion. As to the notifications, seems AOL, Roadrunner and several other mail servers expect to be able to do a reverse DNS lookup on the originator before it’ll allow the email to go through. I just got around to putting in the request to have a reverse DNS mapped for our account today.

I think this is a great idea. 

Do you think bumping up to the next plan did the trick?  The site still seems to be slow to me.

It’s helping, but we’re constantly under barrages of trackback and referrer spam attempts. At any given time I can query apache to show me what’s going on and of the 45 or so child servers spawned anywhere from 16 to 22 of them can be handling attempted trackbacks and/or pings to EE’s referrer logs.

Considering that I haven’t had trackbacks enabled in quite awhile and the fact that I have never left the path to the referrer logs in the templates, it’s saying something that there’s that many attempts on a constant basis to hit the site with spam.

For what it’s worth, I finally have a clone of SEB in a VMware lab. Now all I need is the mythical copious spare time to model and benchmark performance tweaks.

Well I think it is pretty obvious that a VPS is not working.  In fact, this site has killed my confidence in ever using a VPS for anything that requires very much traffic.  I once thought VPS was the way to go, but apparently it is a limited solution.

Maybe the highest level VPS plan would work, but for that money you have much more options.  Honestly I think the best solution here would be to go with PMachine hosting.  They run sites that have much more traffic than SEB, and they are more knowledgeable than anyone in running Expression Engine sites.

The VMware probably won’t be much better.  If you had a hosted DNS account you could just do a switch to the new server and see how it goes.  The problem with this is that I doubt your clone has a mirrored database.  I don’t know much about this stuff, but I bet that would be tricky.

Good Luck!

What works or doesn’t work for you isn’t a discussion I want to have

As a reminder, the move from shared hosting (on a high-traffic server) to a VPS was precipitated by shared hosting being slow and melting down for extended periods of time. The choice of VPS over a dedicated server or other forms of hosting was due to budgetary constraints. The common factor between the shared hosting, the current VPS, and my lab VM is that EE as configured appears to be a CPU hog… It’s a simple matter of arithmetic that even a modest number of sustained hits will create problems even for a dedicated server.

I think you misconstrue my remark about VMware. I’m running a benchmarking lab, including a clone of SEB on my laptop; that’s all. I’m curious to learn what, if anything, will ease the pain. And I sure don’t want to toy with the live site.

pmachinehosting.com, by the way, doesn’t seem to have plans that are a good fit for SEB.

What works or doesn’t work for you isn’t a discussion I want to have

Where did that come from?  I simply said from what I have witnessed with this site, I think I will not be looking for a VPS when I am shopping for my own solutions.  I do have a VPS that is handling a small stream of traffic, but as I gain more experience, I feel a VPS is not the best way to go.

This was a thought that might have little relevence to SEB readers at worst, but it certainly does not warrant a rude response.  Why even enable comments if you feel you want to dictate which discussions to have?

This was not an attack, and I don’t even think it was a troll post.  In light of this situation the best contribution I can make for the site is to quit visiting (saves bandwidth.) This site has primarily been about great discussion.  It appears that discussion is the first to go with the new changes, so I no longer have a reason to be here. 

Good day!

!? Must have been a bad day.

Where did that come from?

You have misquoted (see below) a remark I made in reference to:

In fact, this site has killed my confidence in ever using a VPS for anything that requires very much traffic.  I once thought VPS was the way to go, but apparently it is a limited solution.

Did you miss the *wink*, though? I put it there for the express purpose to convey that no rudeness was intended. Believe me, if I wanted to be rude I would have told you in no uncertain terms to fuck off.

!? Must have been a bad day.

Arc, I use emoticons sparingly, but when I do they are there for a reason. When I wrote the remark, I was sure that it wouldn’t be misunderstood. Now I almost regret putting that there in the first place.

I’ve worked in service for years (I’m young yet) so when I see reactions like that, it’s indicative of a shifted context. I’ve been screamed at by so many customers because of their(high plumbing bills, high traffic, angry kids, stressful pets, in-laws, etc.). Sometimes that stuff happens - I tend to shrug it off.

Arc, call me befuddled. Who do you attribute a bad day to? I might have skipped a groove somewhere…

manofsteel had a bad day, not you . I can’t concieve of a way in which what you said could have been offensive.