One of those days

For those of you who’ve been wondering where I’ve been, mentally and physically, for the last week or so, behold. For those of you who don’t understand what part of that website I was responsible for, no long answer for you. Short answer is, the HTML and the backend.

It was quite time-consuming, and due to the high-profile nature, it got a significant amount of attention from all parties involved. And it continues, for I am once again going to be working during the Super Bowl. Yes, I shouldn’t complain to you folks, seeing as how most of you will probably slap me around and say “be glad you have a job, fool!” but I just have to vent somehow.

So that particular project is settling down, but still has multiple changes that have to be constantly made. This is on top of the other projects I’ve got going on. Then all of a sudden today, the webservers get very sluggish. I find out that a specific page is getting hit at a very rapid rate, as well as our data collection script. The servers can normally keep up with a large amount of traffic, but when such a large amount of connections are all trying to write to the same file (which requires a write lock, which means that each process has to wait for the previous to finish) then things get very slow.

(It was about at this time that I simultaneously got a phone call from one person about one project, an instant message about another, and a very scary looking email regarding the Fanime Con Dealer’s Room. Needless to say, I was a little bit stressed out at that moment.)

I try to figure out who is doing this, but it appears to be a ‘bot, coming from random IP addresses. The weird thing is that the ‘bot is entering “Load” and “Test” as the first and last names of the sweeps. Also, I find out that this particular sweeps hasn’t even launched yet, so no one should know about it. After it eventually dies down about 15 minutes later, I grab the entirety of the logs and find that the IP addresses weren’t random, but there were only about 40 or so of them, and they were in sequential chunks.

I let it sit in the back of my mind for a while. I go back and look at the logs again, and I notice that the User Agent of the browsers are all the same, and doesn’t look familiar. I do a netsearch on it, and lo and behold, I am led to these folks. Turns out, they’re a benchmarking company, and it appears that someone hired them to do a load test on our servers, during peak hours, without telling us.

Heads will roll tomorrow. Oh, yes, heads will roll.