Jan-Lukas Else

Before going to sleep, a quick walk around the block. 🌔

It took me so long to find the cause of a memory leak in GoBlog. I thought it was smart to use a cache for prepared database statements. But I didn’t read the documentation and didn’t know that prepared statements need to be closed when they are no longer needed to free up the allocated resources. 🤦‍♂️ I finally fixed it by removing the prepared statement cache altogether. Less code, fewer problems in the future, and the cache wasn’t much of an improvement anyway. I also learned about the usefulness of memory profiling.

I have a question for the IndieWeb community: What can we do against Webmention spam, except filter it out, when it fails validation? I receive hundreds of invalid Webmentions a day, and even using a filtering DNS server doesn’t seem to help much. But I also don’t want to waste network traffic to access all those spam sites. Is there any good block list I can check first before doing the request for validation? I thought about Akismet, but the API has no such option to only check the submitted URL.

I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I decided to do a little bike tour. It’s so quiet in the morning and I saw some new places in this town and its surrounding. Tomorrow I plan to do a longer trip again.

It seems like I finally fixed a memory leak in GoBlog yesterday, that sometimes made my blog crashing. How? I used Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 Sonnet to write me a new HTTP compression middleware that compresses HTTP responses using zstd or gzip when possible. I needed to instruct a few changes and modify some code lines as the initial implementation was wrong, but thereafter, it finally seems to work better than my original implementation that probably leaked some objects anywhere. Claude also helped me to write unit tests (which I adapted a bit, though) and increase code coverage.

Perfect way to unwind after a stressful day. 🌳