Bandwidth Use Issues

[Xepher]

EDIT: Finally found it... been digging on this for two days. Turns out, I made a really dumb mistake a few weeks ago. See below for updates.

Something is causing a huge spike in bandwidth use this month. I'm about to go over the prepaid amounts bought for the server. I don't think it's any sort of normal use that's doing this, as I'm having a hard time tracking it down. It looks like it might be caused by incoming data, rather than stuff served out. As a temporary measure, I've suspended all OUTGOING traffic on port 80. This means your scripts won't be able to grab remote images and such to process them. Mostly this may break some RSS parsers and such. If you have something that broke, let me know. Most of you shouldn't notice a change though. If this doesn't shake out the problem though, I may have to try some other stuff while tracking it down, and it could be slightly disruptive while I poke around in things. I'll let you know if anything major is going to happen though.

[Xepher]

Well, the problem was this...

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}       !-f
RewriteRule ^/favicon.ico      http://xepher.net/favicon.ico [R,L]


The idea was that if a user doesn't have their own favicon.ico, it'd use the main site one, so the stupid IE browers wouldn't keep hammering for a file that's 404. What it DID do, was result in an endless loop for some reason, causing the browsers to retry several times, for every single page opened. This literally quadrupled the bandwidth, but since no actual file was ever sent, not "bandwidth" was logged by the webserver, thus making it nearly impossible to track down. Since this is sorted, I've removed the limit about outgoing http that I mentioned above. Everything should be back to normal, and hopefully, a bit faster now too.

I'll say this, after 30 hours awake, and banging my head for so long for such a simple mistake, this is going to be a facepalm I remember for a very long time! The weirdest part about it all though, is that I tested the thing, and it WORKED when I first put those lines in place. *shrugs* I'm going to bed!

[fesworks]

Yay!