Last week I was pulling my hair out because signing into both my Movable Type websites seemed to take forever. I thought the problem was MT and was thinking about using another blogging platform like Wordpress. That would have been a huge job so I persevered. I disabled a couple of plug-ins that I thought might be slowing things down, and I turned off the AVG Safe Search and Security Toolbars in Firefox. It went from taking 3 minutes to load a page down to 2 1/2, not much of an improvement but something.
Today I got an email from the Dreamhost team telling me they had to disable the guestbook script on another site of mine, Junee Magic, that was the cause of the server overload problem. Junee Magic is a site I set up in 2005 when I was considering website design as a career. It never really took off and I ended up with a "real" job that paid real money but left the site there. I think it's time to take it down now. If someone actually were to contact me to design a website for them I really wouldn't have the time to do it.
The email said "It appears as if spammers were simply hammering the script, causing instability on your server. Taking a look at the guestbook itself, it seems to have bloated to 146Mb of link spam."
Spammers again! I'd love to wring every one of their rotten necks.
Tonight when I logged in it took less then a minute to load the page so I'm grateful to the guys at Dreamhost for finding the problem. Pity the culprit was my own website.
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