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PDF Exports Disabled

Discussion in 'News' started by PatronusCharm FeedBot, Jan 18, 2008.

  1. PatronusCharm FeedBot

    PatronusCharm FeedBot RSS/Atom Feed Poster Bot

    Joined:
    Jan 6, 2008
    Messages:
    15
    In response to a recent flooding of PatronusCharm's server, PDF exports are now disabled. PDF exports takes a LOT of processing power, and I had assumed that the members of the site would respect and not abuse this feature. I also made sure that Googlebot and the like wouldn't hit it and spike loads. But today a client from France apparently used some sort of spidering technology to perhaps index the site for his/her own use, which did not respect robots.txt and proceeded to hit the PDF export on every single story PC has, and at the time I stopped requests, the process had indexed over 350 pages within a 5 minute interval. This, of course, led to the server being saturated with PDF conversion (about 20 concurrently) and leading to DLP stopping requests to stem the load. I've since disabled PDF exports for an indeterminate amount of time, and perhaps will reappear as a donation-only service.

    -Lord Ravenclaw at Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:46:27 -0600

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