Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

As folks noticed on Thursday morning when we opened hotels, the website displayed errors for 5-10 minutes starting at 9 AM EST due to the rush of traffic that came in.  This was due to a few factors, which I'd like to go into in technical detail below.

First, some raw stats:

Peak bandwidth: approx 3.6 Megabits/sec

Peak connections: 1,060 concurrent connections

Number of users logged into the site: 100+

Here are some graphs that show just how big those numbers are, compared to normal traffic levels:

For those who saw last year's post about the load on the webserver when we opened up hotels, this year's traffic was about twice what last year's traffic was.  I didn't see that coming.

As is plainly visible in the traffic graph, the machine that this website runs on is capabale of much higher bandwidth throughput.  So, what happened?

In a word: caching.  Or rather, the lack thereof in certain cases.

Earlier this weekend, I began work on a new Drupal module: Fivestar Stats.

Right now, it does the following:

• Gets total vote stats, including the average rating
• Tells what IP addresses:
• Are top voters
• Are top 1-star voters (to catch abuse)
• Have the lowest vote average. (generally mean people)
• Tells what users:
• Have the highest average rating
• Have the lowest average rating
• Have had the most 1-star votes cast against them (to catch abuse)

I have more features (and screenshots!) planned, but this is just the start.

Fivestar Stats can be downloaded from:

http://github.com/dmuth/fivestarstats

Enjoy!

Earlier today, I performed a major Drupal upgrade on another site that I run. Part of the upgrade involved me installing the Advanced Forum module to bring the forums a little more up to date with other sites that are out there.

Along the way, I learned something interesting: the Author Pane module does NOT display on blog posts.

It looked rather odd when comments on the blog posts had detailed user info, but the post itself did not. So I set out to fix that. I ended up commenting out the line print $picture; in node.tpl.php and instead adding in these lines:

$account = user_load($node->uid);
$template = "advf-author-pane";
$author_pane = theme('author_pane', $account,
advanced_forum_path_to_images(), $template);
print $author_pane;

The code is fairly straightforward. It loads user info on the author of the post, and the theme() function loads the author_pane template, passing in the user data.

Enjoy!

Wow, it's been awhile since I've written here. Real life has had me very busy lately. I've done some neat things though, and I hope to post more about them soon.

The first neat thing I did recently was to roll out some badly needed updates for the user pages on anthrocon.org.

Before, I merely used the default pages that Drupal provided. The problem was that the pages looked a little... bland. Among other things, there were no icons for the various social networking services, and that just wouldn't do. So I read up on how to customize the user profile layout in Drupal and spent a couple of evenings writing some PHP code and making use of Drupal's theming functions.

Here are the old and the new pages side by side. Click on either to get a full page in a separate window.

Old and busted:		New hotness:

The upside of this effort is that when I'm ready to upgrade the Save Ardmore Coalition site to Drupal 6, I can pretty much just copy over my user templates on a wholesale basis, and save myself from having to redo all that work. :-)

Looking back after this morning's stampede, I thought I'd share with folks how the webserver held up, since I know I am not the only geek out there. And, truth be told, I was a bit nervous myself, since I wasn't quite sure just how much traffic we would get and if the webserver would survive, or turn into a smoking crater.

Well, here's what we got:

The first hump is a manual backup I did last night. The second is the automatic backup that runs every morning, where the database and files are rsynced to a machine at another data center. The third hump at 9 AM was when we opened hotel reservations. 1.4 Megabits/sec doesn't look too bad, until you look at:

The 336 simultaneous connections a second was far more interesting. That's about 16 times the normal number of connections to the webserver.

So, what were the effects? Let's look at MySQL first:

While using the nginx webserver with a Drupal installation I noticed something odd. Whenever I submitted a form (with the GET method) or clicked on a link that had a space in it, it would be converted to a plus sign in the URL. Actually, that's not the odd path--the web browser is doing proper URL encoding since spaces are not allowed in URLs.

The weird part is that after the request got to the webserver, and the server processed it and passed it to PHP, and PHP loaded Drupal and executed the PHP code, the plus sign failed to be turned back into a space when using the nginx webserver. Works fine in Apache, but not in nginx.

The symptom is that if I tried to perform a search or edit my user profile, or anything else that involved a plus sign in the GET data, when that data was processed by PHP, the plus sign was still there. i.e., I would see "term1+term2" in the search box, instead of "term1 term2".

So, how to fix this? I could have spent some time reading RFCs, and looking through the source from PHP and nginx, or I could have my site working again. I opted for the latter, and found that this line of code at the very beginning of Drupal's index.php seems to do the trick:

$_GET["q"] = strtr($_GET["q"], "+", " ");

It's silly, and may even be a bit stupid, but it sure does the trick.

This part of the site contains software that I have written over time. Everything here is available under the Gnu Public License (GPL).

Newer stuff:

• Fivestarstats- This is an add-on for Drupal's Fivestar module. It generates reports of the following stats:
  • Top Voters by IP
  • Top 1-star Voters by IP
  • Lower Vote Average by IP
  • Top-rated Users
  • Top # of Posts/Comments
  • Most 1-star Votes Received
  • Bottom-rated Users
• Anthrocon Webform - An add-on to Drupal's Webform module. It provides a tab-delimited download for webform submissions that presents multi-selects as comma-delimited lists instead of separate fields. Very handy for fields that have 10 or more options to choose from!
• Anthrocon Dealers - This is an add-on for Drupal's Ubercart module. It provides reports to our Dealers Room staff of who purchased Dealers Room tables for our convention.
• Anthrocon-reg - The pre-registration and on-site registration system for Anthrocon. This software, written as a Drupal module, accepts credit cards at pre-registration, talks to Authorize.net, and drives CR-80 badge printers at on-site registration. Works well under LAMP or WAMP.
• Doug's Drupal Tools - I had a few things I wanted to add into Drupal, so I added them. :-) This Drupal module increases logging of certain events, and integrates with the Flag module and Privatemsg module. I use this module on some websites I run.
• Doug's Drupal Templates - A series of user and page templates for Drupal that I wrote. They contain support for social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and instant messenger support in both user profiles and forum posts. I also use this module on some websites I run.

Older stuff:

• My Drupal Patch page - I've gotten into Drupal lately, so I've written a bunch of patches for bugs that I found in some of its modules. You can find them here.
• My Drupal Modules page - Now I've begun writing modules for Drupal. They can all be found here.
• Older Software I've Written - In years past, I've had the occasional need for a utilty that didn't exist, so I'd write it. This page holds those utilities.