FabulousEntertainment

When I was a kid we didn’t have a McDonalds in my home town. I heard lots of stories about McDonalds, how there was every type of burger you could imagine, the slick American service, the French fries which were totally different to what we called “chips”.

Finally, after years McDonalds did open. And I really didn’t like it that much. It was, in short, a huge disappointment.

Since I started this blog I’ve been very focused on Fab Swingers’s Google rankings and finally the site is showing up high for many of the key terms I’ve been targeting. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the sudden move up has happened at the same time as Google Analytics has shown us passing the 1 million page views a day mark.

Yet, I feel slightly let down. The effect of the Google rankings has been tiny compared with the word of mouth and even the people who are joining via Google aren’t generally the people that bring most to the site.

I’m pleased that it’s finally happened but it turns out not to be a big deal.

I do like Sausage Egg McMuffins though.

I’ve had some problems with backup running very slowly — in fact by the time backup of the images has finished, it’s pretty much time to begin again.

However it turns out to be a cock-up on my part. I was using rsync which is only supposed to copy over files that have changed. But if you forget to use the -t or –times option then the modification dates are not copied over which means that every single file needs to be copied over the network to find out whether or not it has changed. Whoops!

As I now have two servers at The Planet which are in different data centers (Dallas and Houston) my backup plan is just to rsync the files between then.

I am also considering using rsync to allow my applications to upload photos to the assets server, however I may use Samba instead. NFS is out though!

UPDATE: After a great deal of thought over the past few weeks I’ve reached a decision. I thought about dozens of alternatives but I needed something very secure, robust (even when there is a network outage) and asynchronous with the file uploads so that the user isn’t kept hanging around when they are uploading their images.

The solution is that photos will upload on the applications server and also be served from there. This will result in fast, reliable upload. A cronjob will then rsync the photos over to the assets server every few minutes and will update the photos table to show that the photo has now moved over so future pages will get it from the assets server. I think this should work pretty well!

It is also quite future proof, if I switched to using a Content Delivery Networks (and I note that Peer1 allow adult sites on their CDN) then this approach would work great for uploading the images to it.

I was just taking a look at the Alexa page for The Adulthub and I noticed that they had recently had a big traffic spike - from Nigeria!

Right now, Alexa is reporting 21.8% of the Adulthub’s users from that country. We have also had an increase in attempted spam from Nigeria on our site however our blanket ban on Africa has been quite effective at keeping them under control. I guess that they are just going through a phase of targeting swingers sites.

But to have over 20% of site traffic from spammers is pretty bad and must be annoying a lot of their users.

Yesterday we passed the 1,000,000 page views a day for the first time and hits on the assets server (which is presently on the same box) were peaking at 100 hits per second. So, not bad for a single fairly low powered server.

From what I’ve read, The Planet have now upgraded the bandwidth on their virtual rack product to 1 Gb. This makes it much more useful and I now plan to get two new servers in a virtual rack, one running the applications server and one running the database. I’ll leave the present server doing mail (because it is such a pain to change the IP address of a mail server) and also serving the assets.

For the new servers I’m not going to bother so much about CPU but I will be looking at memory and the speed of the hard drive as the main issue has been IO.