itech

Recently the company I work for migrated to new servers. Specifically a migration from physical boxes to VMs. During this migration we were all fairly confident that our architecture would work and would be able to sustain considerable traffic. What is considerable traffic? In all honesty none of us even our consultants could say for sure. In order to test the system we needed to test with our applications running and getting real world data with out actually impacting our users. In researching this I found there were two tools that seem to keep showing up. The first was Jmeter, the second was Siege. If you have access to a linux box I highly recommend siege over Jmeter for simple stress testing. Siege turned out to be easy to use, configure, and run. So here is a little information on how to get started with siege and run some test against you application. Installing Siege Mac OSX Open Terminal Download the latest version of siege ( 3.0.6 – current) http://download.joedog.o...

Recently I had an application become the victim of bot spam. Since the web is something on the order of 60% bot traffic, many of these are inconsequential and can safely be blocked. I chose to block them based on user agent, since many of these bots have a range of IP addresses they can utilize. Here is a list of the bots I was able to block from several application, with out impacting SEO. Not all of these bots will be right to block for every application. The top listed one, “^$” is the regex for an empty string. I do not allow bots to access the pages unless they identify with a user-agent, I found most often the only things hitting my these applications with out a user agent were security tools gone rogue. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 ...