My BLOG!

Include statements on PHP blocked by Firewall!

Turns out the downtime on the server was all caused by the Firewall.

The sites load random text link ads off another server on a different provider.  The sites get massive hits, around 300,000 a day. 

During peak times, the site was getting so many hits, that the firewall (that's supposed to protect against ddos floods) detetected these extra data transfers and deemed them to be a flood, and blocked them for a short period.  This caused httpd processes to hang, and consequently the MaxClients was getting reached (mine is set to 1000).  During these peak times, I often noticed that the server was lagging heavily and apache kept failing, until the peak times were done.

Eventually, these peak hours with the excessive data transfer between the two servers happenned so many times that the firewall just blocked the transfer altogether, permanently.

Httpd kept failing as the MaxClients was reached at 1000 and stayed there.  Each time a page tried to pull up a random text ad from the other server, it was blocked, and each page has about 10 of such include statements.  Long story short, the server just lagged until it stopped serving pages.

By the time all this was found out, I had already set up a backup server with Rippleweb, and at Awknet I had completely set up a server which serves all it's databases off a separate db server on 8 SCSI hard drives with 8 GB RAM.

Well, it works, and all sites load fine and fast, and I have a bit of knowledge in case Apache starts acting weird again -- I know what the problem is!