Sorry for the interruption in service. For about 30 minutes or so, FrontBurner was down. The reason? Bing. The Microsoft search engine has a bot that isn’t very bright. First, it’s working during daylight hours, when we humans are more likely to be using our bandwidth. Friendlier bots do their work during the night. Second, the Bing bot was deluging us with requests for FrontBurner pages that aren’t cached, sending up to 400 requests in 30 seconds. If those requests were for the homepage, no problem. It is cached and ready to serve up. But the requests were for category pages (the little blue link just to the left of the comments link at the end of each post), meaning each request set our servers to work generating pages that didn’t already exist, quickly overtaxing our humble machines.
That’s the story I’m sticking to, anyway.
