Category: Uncategorized

So, fun story. In the middle of ActivityPub’s standardization, the Social Web Working Group nearly got shut down because we couldn’t get the big corporate players to pay attention to us, and the W3C’s membership structure required paid membership participation.

We tried *desperately* to get Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc to look at us. They weren’t interested. What I heard was that they had written off the idea that decentralized social networks could exist or work by then.

Luckily, management agreed that the SocialWG’s work was interesting enough that we should continue. And later having seen what happened when big players entered a standards group… ActivityPub was probably a better spec for being written by people passionate about it instead.

But anyway. That’s all to say… it’s so *weird* now to be in the present moment, as you can imagine…

—@cwebber

Hey folks!
I thought today of all days, when a new social media platform is grabbing all the attention, would be a great time to tell you all I have a brand new website! Let’s get anachronistic!

https://designthinking.lol

—@designthinkingcomic

The morale of the story?

Hire a professional to work on your website.

I know it is difficult to filter us out of the rest of the bunch consisting of gold diggers, fraudsters and hacks, but we are usually available on a short notice in case something like this happens.

—@alda

Then an actual Linux cron job was being run on the old server every 3 hours. It would run wget on index.php with that specific GET parameter set.

If there was no response or the status was not “200 ok”, it would try again and again.

Again and again, until the machine crashed.

—@alda

It turns out that the guy who had been contracted for the accounting software integration had modified the active theme to include an obscure and weird PHP class that syncs the available products/SKUs with the accounting software.

This was a heavy task and took about a minute to run manually and was triggered by a request to index.php, using a specific GET parameter.

—@alda

So, it happens regularly, it is index.php, there’s no plugin doing this and the WordPress core has not been modified.

Weird, right?

—@alda

I didn’t find anything in the list of cron jobs on that machine and WordPress did not have a plugin or a wp-cron job that indicated anything happening every 3 hours.

The guy also rambled something about our machines being seriously underprovisioned, so we allocated more memory and CPU cores for this and while it did recover quicker, it still crashed regardless of havin 16 GB of memory and 4 cores.

And it was index.php of all things that was blowing everything up every 3 hours on the hour.

—@alda

So I started monitoring things — and yes, it the server crashed every 3 hours as exponential amounts of memory were being reserved until the machine crashes.

I had a hard time isolating the issue as it seemed to stem from index.php (which is unusual), so I did the usual thing and cleaned out some large-ish values from the wp-options table and installed memcached.

Then I contacted the guy who had done this accounting software integration, who rambled something about a cron job.

—@alda

An issue that I ran into last week:

A business sought me out because of an issue with a #WordPress site they were running. The server got overloaded and crashed every 3 hours for half an hour at a time and it was important to get to the bottom of this.

The hints that I got were that the site had been migrated to a new server in order to isolate it and that the issue started when someone was hired to integrate certain accounting software with it. 🧵

—@alda

the eu is at war with meta over user privacy, and gruber has picked a side

—@penllawen

There’s something very odd about gruber’s constant EU bashing for actually doing a good job at protecting its citizens. Meta is a privacy nightmare, the opposite of Apple, and all of the sudden now it’s cool to use their twitter clone and the EU is missing out?

—@tclementdev