State of the HD server

[Uncle Jesse]

I've done a ton of work on the back end of HD over the last few months. The last 2-3 days we were having huge load spikes on the server end, which I finally tracked down to a few issues with the back end database. Since adding a few indexes to a few tables, things are running much better. Compared to last October/November when the server was basically unusable and I didn't have any time to devote to things, we are immeasurably better.

Right now almost exactly 70% of requests to HD are being served by cache, so they never even hit our software, much less the server. This has helped a lot. I've also added some logic to make spoofed bot hits to HD very painful for the spoofers.

Every storm is a new opportunity to learn and harden things. It will happen again, but for now things are better than ever, and without putting HD behind cloudflare or some other CDN. Even better, I haven't taken any of the several offers to buy HD, which would put it under the control of some corporate entity which would deluge all of us with advertisements.

If and when you encounter any issues, please PM me. I am sure there are issues because the server-side security/hardening involves dozens of scripts and config files totaling many thousands of lines. I'll always do my best to fix problems.

Thanks for being patient. As I've said many times before, if HD is down or unusable, "We will always be back."