blbl.org kills my stuff

Unfortunately, blbl.org (my BLog Blocking List) is generating a lot of load on my poor colo’d machine, and is causing general slowness and at times outright failures of my other websites.

Also unfortunately for blbl.org, I like my other websites being up more than I like blbl.org being up, so this means one of several things:

• I shut it down
• I move it to another machine that can handle it
• I change it so it generates less load

Of these, I’m obviously least keen on the first one - although I’m not sure really how much use it is being compared to the rest of Spam Karma’s calculations. As it’s been taking more effort (on the server’s part) to rebuild the zone recently, I’ve reduced the frequency of the updates, which also means it’s less effective. Blog spammers hit hard and fast (believe me, I’ve seen the submissions pour in at >4/sec per host) and long gaps in updating the zone mean I might as well not bother.

Moving it to another machine is an option, but I lack the financial ability to do it. It’s as simple as that. I can afford my colo at the moment no problem, but I don’t feel like stretching to another one - particularly because it would need a reasonably spec’d machine to do it justice and I can’t really go throwing around money at that. I need to save up and buy a house and not be poor generally (have you seen the housing market around here recently? It’s mad).

The same kind of goes for changing it to generate less load. There’s actually two reasons behind not wanting to go for this option - primarily my time is finite and at the moment my free time is generally negative anyway. The second is that while I can think of other ways of doing this that would be less of a burden on the server, they could also be less reliable for false positives.

Of these options, the third is the most likely to happen - but if it doesn’t help or I can’t find the time to do it, it’ll have to be the first, sorry.

In either case, you should probably expect somewhat intermittent service from blbl.org both for submissions and for lookups while I try things out. If I decide to make it go away, I’m more than happy for someone else to take it on. I’m not going to make it return a hit for * or anything stupid like that, as has been known to be done for some RBLs :) Since I suspect the majority of people have blbl.org enabled in SK2 just because it’s the default means they have no responsibility to check up on news about it.

Anyway, that’s how it is. We’ll see where it goes from here :)