Mirroring the site - PHP Classes blog

By Manuel Lemos
manuellemos.net
<email contact>

Hello,


First of all, I would like to thank to Larry Rosenman for promptly providing the server and his free time so that newsletters like this and the notification messages could be delivered to the PHP Classes site subscribers like yourself. In the name of the site subscribers, thanks again Larry.


As you may have noticed, the PHP Classes site has be through outages because its scripts were consuming too much resources of the virtual server where it hosted. Lately I realized that there have been some users that were trying to mirror the site contents using software that establishes a large amount of simultaneous HTTP connections that obviously the site can't handle.


If you are insterested to mirror the site, please contact me first. I know that no harm was intended, but the way that you are doing is causing denial of service preventing anybody to use the site. I will be providing a mirroring service as soon as I can. If you are interested to mirror the site, please contact me so you can join in the testing period.


Meanwhile, to prevent the site to be taken out of service because of mirroring, I am blocking any attempt to make an excessive number of requests in a short period. When that happens, the site will return an error "503 Service Unavailable". If you get this error during normal usage, please contact me so I can tune the filter configuration.


I also installed a PHP Cache engine to speedup the execution of the site scripts. The site should run be much faster now.


Unfortunately, this required me to upgrade PHP to version 4.1.0 and the uses of strtok and dirname functions that PHP developers broke before this version made the notification message delivery break in unsuspicious places. This caused the notification of some class files that were changed to not be done without the chance to repeat it.

Several of the affected classes are some of the most popular public classes that I uploaded to this site. I will upload fixed versions soon.


Anyway, because of these problems, many classes are still pending to be approved. I would like to ask their authors to be patient so the site can recover smoothly without being flooded again.


If you would like to discuss these and other subjects, feel free to join the php-objects mailing list by sending a message to php-objects-subscribe@egroups.com or visiting the page http://groups.yahoo.com/group/php-objects/ .


Regards,

Manuel Lemos