GamingUnion.net

Kyle · **November 01, 2009 04:55:56 PM**

Hey everyone, thanks to some good investigating on Darryl's part, and some well timed pestering on mine, the issues with the site being slow have been resolved! The server is now lightning fast again, and shouldn't cause any annoying slow downs for a long, LONG time to come.

What was the issue? Well, we have this old site on the network, SquareUnion.com. Turns out the topsites thing we ran on there, that would rank fellow fansites that signed up, was being abused. We let whomever signed up join, so about 700 of Chinese and Turkish websites signed up. How it works is they display this little .png image (Square Union logo) on every page of their website, then our server counts how many times a page was loaded on their site. With those numbers we then rank the biggest fansites that participate.

Problem is these 700 websites were not supposed to be on there, and they get an insane amount of traffic when all put together, so the tiny, 1 kilobyte image was being downloaded over 1 million times a day from all these sites, which really adds up! That happened for about 90 days straight, so 90,000,000 connections to our server over the past month and a half REALLY slowed things down a ton.

We've since deleted the topsites, and taken SquareUnion.com offline, so now the 700 websites aren't displaying an image from our server on all their pages and killing our speed anymore Big Grin

. Sorry again for that, we were getting very fed up with it too!

**Darryl** · **November 01, 2009 05:04:02 PM**

Well, we hope that was the problem. It seems to have been fixed, so hopefully things will be smooth from now on. Smile

Damian · **November 01, 2009 08:00:41 PM**

Good sleuthing GU team Big Grin

I'm glad the problem has been fixed.

Kyle · **November 01, 2009 08:10:53 PM**

Next thing on my to-do list is FINALLY answer all the suggestions you guys have been posting Big Grin

.

Zero · **November 02, 2009 12:41:23 AM**

heh, interesting, I never thought of that possibility... I know i once wound up at the topsite section, but never thought all that slowdown could have been caused by false website listings...