It seems that this afternoon someone is performing some kind of DoS attack against our server. The PerfCounter reports that there are something like 100k open connections and the ASP.NET worker process consumes 100% of CPU time.

I apologize for any inconvenience, but I really have no tools to stop this right now except resetting IIS and this requires a manual action. At any rate, I reduced the number of queued requests to 100 (default is 1000). I hope this will help.

Update: BTW, the server seems to stay up without too much trouble.

All the content has been migrated to the new server which seems to handle the load a lot better than the old one.

The old server, having served us for one year, is now shut down and will soon be discarded (being a VPS).

So, the new server is now (almost) fully configured and seems to run fine (even PHP on FastCGI). One of the following days I will finally migrate the website, forum and blog.

On a side note, the number of posts in the forum has reached an important milestone:

In the last few days I developed a little plugin (Formatter Provider) that records all the wiki page views, and generates a statistical analysis like this:

You can take a look at it here. A little roundup of the features:

• Automatic bot filtering (opt-out)
• Page hits counter
• Sessions counter
• Possibility to discard the hits generated by specific wiki usernames (such as mine, so the stats are not polluted by me checking the results every ten minutes)
• Low performance impact when recording visits (hits are stored on disk every now and then)
• Magic Word, which allows to discard requests adding a parameter to the query string (e.g. ?NoStats=1)
• Charts for daily and weekly visits distributions
• Chart for visitors’ language distribution
• Chart for visitors’ OS and browser distributions
• Possibility to let anonymous users to view the results (opt-in)
• Easy integration (the plugin records the visits by default, and in order to view the results you just have to put “{stats}” somewhere in the wiki).

The plugin is still in test, especially to ensure that it does not cause performance pitfalls on high-traffic websites, so it’s not yet included in the Plugin Pack. It’s in the nightly build, though.

I am not really into this statistics thing, so I developed this plugin in a really dummy way (but I’m sure you’ll help reporting bugs). For example, the average values displayed by the plugin are actually a prediction: the Avg. sessions/month value is calculated as the Avg. sessions/day * 30, which is actually computed as total # of sessions / fractional # of days. I’m sure the math is correct, but 14,400 sessions (= unique visitors) per month feels like a huge number, especially for a site like this which has a very small and specific audience.

It happens that ScrewTurn Wiki has been listed in the ASP.NET Community Projects (thanks to Ben for notifying me, because I haven’t noticed). It’s right below FlexWiki…

I took two full-page screenshots, one for the news item and another for the Community Projects page. I think this is a very important accomplishment for a project like STW, whose success is only determined by its users.

A few statistics for the project (just to have some “fun”):

• 1,440 SVN revisions
• 28,156 lines of code
• 459 source code and resources files
• 73 resolved bugs (8 open)
• 121 feature and enhancement requests
• 77 known public wikis
• 18 plugins
• 10 interface languages

Not very impressive if you ask me, but interesting nonetheless. Thanks to all the contributors, especially to the translators which do a very hard work.

More good news in the next days, so stay tuned.