FreshPorts now speaks seven languages: English, plus German, French (Canada), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish, and Chinese (Simplified). Each translation was done by a volunteer, and I am grateful to all of them: Stefan Esser, Marc Pearson, Gustavo Nobrega, Vladlen Popolitov, Yusuf Yaman, and ykla. The website keeps changing, and each change can bring new text.
Translations wanted Read More »
FreshPorts has new newsfeeds, in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, at /--/feeds/. The old feeds under /backend/ still work, and nothing changes for you today. Later, the old URLs will be redirected to the new ones. If you subscribe to a FreshPorts feed, now is a good time to switch. The new feeds https://www.freshports.org/--/feeds/commits.php: the
FreshPorts has new RSS and Atom feeds Read More »
After the October speed-up, I looked at what the production database was still spending its time on. The top two statements had nothing to do with the bots. They were the ordinary work of showing a port page, and of working out what any other URL refers to. Both are now cheaper. This post says
Cheaper port pages and URL lookups Read More »
In FreshPorts October speed-up I wrote about making pages cheaper to build. This post is about not sending them at all, when your browser already has the latest copy. Conditional GET When FreshPorts sends a page, it can include a Last-Modified time and an ETag, a short tag for that version of the page. On
FreshPorts now answers “not modified” Read More »
Old passwords, new hashes FreshPorts has stored user passwords as bcrypt hashes since April 2021. Yet most of the hashes in the production database were still MD5-crypt. This post covers why, what I did about it, and two bugs found along the way. How the hashes get upgraded Passwords are hashed in the database with
If you haven’t logged in since 2021, reset your password Read More »
FreshPorts has seven databases. Each website has its own: dvl, dev, test, stage, foo, bar, and production on RDS. They are all built from the database-schema repo. They should all be the same. Today I decided to find out if they are. They mostly are. The repo is not. I’m documenting this so I have
Database schema reconciliation Read More »
Earlier this month a botnet found its way through the FreshPorts search page and kept the production database at 100% CPU. Over the following days I limited search to logged-in users, made a series of database changes, and on 17 October deployed a release with several search fixes. This post looks at what all that
FreshPorts October speed-up Read More »
This is not yet deployed and is still in test. When a date appears here, it has been deployed to production. Every port page on FreshPorts has a line reading People watching this port, also watch: followed by up to five links. Until now, that list was calculated every time the page was built. For
Precomputing “People watching this port, also watch” Read More »
This applies to upcoming webserver changes. When you see a date in this paragraph, it has been deployed. The search gate was meant to keep bots away from the search page while letting people in without a login. A botnet got past it, and the database ran at 100% CPU until search was restricted to
Deterring bots, but letting people in Read More »
These notes are for the next website release: 2.16.4 Earlier this week, the production database ran at 100% CPU. Turning off searches for visitors who are not logged in brought it down to 22%, and then to 10%. This post covers what was found, and the changes being deployed to fix it. What was found
Search improvements Read More »