I noticed the site was getting a lot of traffic and couldn’t figure out what was causing my sites to eventually become unresponsive. Since I have some free time on my hands I figured it would be a good time to look into it.

cat /var/log/apache2/*.access.log | cut -d'"' -f2,3 | awk '{print $4" "$2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | head

This resulted in A LOT of requests against xmlrpc.php. This is just my dinky little site but turns out there are a lot of script kids out there that like to hack up the xmlrpc.php to do their bidding. So I shut it off completely with an .htaccess directive.

And wouldn’t you know it… my apache2 processes haven’t spun up past 12 since I did it. I’ll get some updated photos up here soon too – I’d love to share some pics of the kids (and the fur kid) and maybe keep an actual running blog for a bit.

So entry first entry in over a year – complete!