Table:Break downs and down time

Discussion
If you were on here earlier, you'd notice that the website was down for a couple of hours. According to my sources, it was at least 6 hours. That is terrible, in my mind. It is also unfortunate that I was sleeping during this downtime. So I could first catch when I got up.

The reasoning for this is that a picture on the Madhouse have become a bit too popular for my liking. I speak of an animated picture of Dr. Zoidberg dancing, specifically located at  and. However, if you try either, you will receive a 404, because I have renamed them (just FYI for the Madhouse maintainers reading this).

A French torrent forum (torrent411.com) had a user using this very image as their avatar. Unfortunately, this site was extremely popular, and overloaded the server during that period, I moved the image and tried to cut off traffic from that site. But futile. The usage of this image have now appeared numerous places.

You may wonder why people still use it if it is not working? I dunno, maybe someone did not get the memo. And if you're wondering how it can bring down a server if the picture does not exist. Every time it is request, Apache will have to look for it and find out it doesn't exist. In other words, despite the little effort Apache actually has to do to find it, it still is some effort. And when hundreds of these efforts are required at once, the server simply cannot cope.

I currently looking into methods of how to avoid this. However, I do not have much time on my hands lately, so the amount of time looking for these methods will be limited. And hopefully, these people still stop using the image. --Svip 19:52, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I had the same problem with people using Zapp as an avatar on various sites. They think they can just use anyone's pictures without asking. Forum users are the worst at internet etiquette. My solution was to block hotlinking to the sites that were the worst offenders. It still causes a little bandwidth use from the requests, but not as much as actually serving the pictures... --Buddy 01:27, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, unfortunately, bandwidth is not the bottleneck here. Apache is.  We could - if Apache would run along - serve all these requests with the picture.  Unfortunately, our current set up is simply not ... fast enough.  But, like I said, I am trying to work on that, if I just didn't have an exam to do this week. --Svip 09:16, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, since this over usage of this very image have been bringing down site like every two hours, and required me to restart Apache, I have now done a temporary solution and forced Apache to restart every hour. This means any connection made every full hour will be interrupted. But in the furthest cases, it should keep the wiki up even while I am sleeping. I mean, it being inactive for less than 5 seconds every hour is better than it being down for 12 hours, right?

That being said; I am now capable of looking for a solution to our problem. --Svip 16:17, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Does it involve using the Clamps on people who steal things? --Buddy 16:34, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, I wish that feature existed in Apache. Unfortunately, mod_clamps have been cancelled! --Svip 16:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)