MarkMaunder dot com

How to limit website visitor bandwidth by country

This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks. If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if […]

March 4, 2010 | Scaling, Technology | 1 comment

How to handle 1000's of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS

There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails. Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget: […]

December 1, 2009 | Scaling, Startups, Technology | 2 comments

Troubleshooting

It’s funny how when you’re troubleshooting a performance issue on your servers that suddenly made the load average spike to 14 (350% with four CPU cores) at 6:30am on a Sunday morning (yay!) all the stats look like garbage until you figure out what it is and then it’s so glaringly obvious that you spend […]

April 6, 2008 | Scaling | No comments

Very high performance web servers

Have you ever tried to get Apache to handle 10,000 concurrent connections? For example, you have a very busy website and you enable keepalive on your web server. Then you set the timeout to something high like 300 seconds for ridiculously slow clients (sounds crazy but I think that’s Apache’s default). All of a sudden […]

March 23, 2008 | Scaling | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.