Pruning

Following the weekend’s fun and frolicking with Varnish and having found (due to my having actually looked at the logs for once, on account of the change) that somehow people were still hitting my site to get at an RSS feed I switched off in 2008 or so, I’ve moved things around a bit to encourage humans to re-subscribe to the correct feed URL and to kick off robots that don’t know any better.

I also removed or moved around some Wiki pages that were clearly over popular (i.e., wrong guesses from Yaki as it tried to resolve missing pages by redirecting to closest matches), confirming in the process that there are far too many outdated links out there.

So I did a bit more hacking and modified Yaki to send me a UDP packet with summary details of the HTTP requests it has: status code, URL, bytes and time (both CPU and clock time).

Since Varnish is currently in front of Yaki and with a cache hit ratio of around 85%, the requests that do reach Yaki are a manageable amount, and a small Lua script on my router takes the UDP packets:

302 /rss - 0.000000 0.000554
200 /space/HomePage 46034 0.001000 0.007034
200 /favicon.ico 4286 0.000000 0.001100
...

…and keeps a running tally. I’m thinking of re-purposing a Chumby for displaying some sort of dynamic chart, but the hacks required are too time-consuming, and I’m still coping with the loss of my NSLU2 (more on that later).