This time around it was ABC Radio Ballarat, who had seen my recent posts on the Ballarat line through Bacchus Marsh and curve easing for faster trains, and thought it would be of interest to their listeners.

I said yes, and so I was up early the next morning jabbering on about the history of the Ballarat line.

We’ve seen a lot of changes to the Ballarat train line over the last couple decades, but it’s only when you piece it all together that you see the sheer scale of the works that have been done.

Marcus Wong is an avid train fan and has been writing about the Ballarat line over the past few weeks on his blog Waking Up in Geelong, unearthing some answers to the strange quirks in how it was built.

You can check me out at the ABC Radio website.

Or listen to it below.

Unfortunately the recording cuts off abruptly at the end, but luckily it’s only the last 30 seconds or so.

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The story started on May 25, when somebody on Reddit posted a photo titled “I want to go down the forbidden ramp at Southern Cross Station. I’ve got no idea what’s down there, but I’m assuming dragons?” over at /r/Melbourne.

Now I’ve got a lot of photos online showing the old underpass beneath the station, so it wasn’t long before someone shared them to the thread.

Setting off the hits on my photo gallery.

By July 2021 piece on the remains of the Spencer Street Station subway also got a run, alongside my follow up piece Building the Spencer Street Station subway – a history.

Victorian Railways annual report 1961-62

Then the next morning something different – messages via various channels from a producer at ABC Radio Melbourne.

Hey Marcus

Is there a number I can call you on?

Love to chat to you about the Southern cross tunnels…

Anyway, I gave them a ring, and later that day I was on the radio blabbering on about the tunnels at Southern Cross Station.

Which was then followed by a handful of text messages and emails from friends and family who listen to ABC Radio and heard me on air.

You can listen to it at the ABC Radio website, or below.

Footnote

I even managed in to slip in a bonus piece into the interview – why the Western Ring Road takes a kink around Ardeer.

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Later that day I noticed that my website was now running rather sluggishly, so checked the logs – an explosion in traffic.

And the reason – someone over at Hacker News had shared a link to it, and it was getting heaps of traffic.

I’m an occasional visitor to the site, which is a social news website like Reddit, but with a focus on computer science and entrepreneurship – so I was kinda surprised to see it getting a run over there.

Of course, given the tech background of the readers, discussion soon went off onto the ‘hug of death‘ all of the traffic was giving my poor web server.

As well as jokes about the poor state of Australia’s internet.

And fixing it?

I run my websites on a virtual private server (VPS) that I manage myself, so unfortunately for me I was on my to manage the flood of traffic.

My initial solution was the simplest, but also costly – just scale up my server to one with twice the CPU cores and twice the RAM.

That made my site more responsive, but I didn’t want to double my monthly web hosting costs, so it was time to get smart. These symptoms sounded exactly like my server.

If your VPS gets overloaded, and reaches the maximum number of clients it can serve at once, it will serve those and other users will simply get a quick failure. They can then reload the page and maybe have greater success on the second try.

This sounds bad, but believe me, it’s much better to have these connections close quickly but leave the server in a healthy state rather than hanging open for an eternity. Surprisingly you can get better performance from a server that has fewer child processes but responds faster than it is to have a server with more child processes that it is unable to handle.

I had to dig into the settings of Apache to optimise them for the resources my server had available.

Most operating systems’ default Apache configurations are not well suited for smaller servers – 25 child processes or more is common. If each of your Apache child processes uses 120MB of RAM, then your VPS would need 3GB just for Apache.

One visitor’s web browser may request 4 items from the website at once, so with only 7 or 8 people trying to load a page at the same time your cloud server can become overloaded. This causes the web page to hang in a constantly loading state for what seems like an eternity.

It is often the case that the server will keep these dead Apache processes active, attempting to serve content long after the user gave up, which reduces the number of processes available to serve users and reduces the amount of system RAM available. This causes what is commonly known as a downward spiral that ends in a bad experience for both you and your site’s visitors.

What you should do is figure out how much RAM your application needs, and then figure out how much is left, and allocate most of that to Apache.

I used the handy apache2buddy tool to analyse the RAM usage on my server, and calculate the maximum number of processes Apache should be allowed to spin up.

And since making these changes, the uptime of my websites has skyrocketed.

The status page found above is powered by the “Cloudflare Worker – Status Page” tool created by Adam Janiš.

Footnote: the ‘Slashdot effect’

Having your website taken down when a popular site links to you has been a thing for years – it’s called the ‘Slashdot effect‘ after one of the early social news websites of the 2000s – Slashdot.

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My current posting schedule is as follows:

• Two posts a week here (104 posts/year)
• Once a fortnight about European railways at www.eurogunzel.com (26 posts/year)
• Once a month on Hong Kong at www.checkerboardhill.com (12 posts/year)

As to how I managed to churn out so many blog posts, I don’t actually sit down at the same time every weekend and type out the posts for the next week. Instead, my workflow is as flows:

Step 1:

Add an entry to my ever increasing list of prospective blog post topics. Normally they are just links to newspaper articles, interesting reports in PDF format, or a collection of photos I’m intending to write more about.

Step 2:

Dig through my list of draft entries until I find something that grabs my interest, then start writing and further research.

Step 3:

Hit a roadblock and procrastinate. Writers block, a dead end on the research front, or a lack of photos are common causes.

Step 4 (optional):

Realise I have bitten off more than I can chew for one blog post, and spin off part of it into a future post. A variant of this is when I find other interesting bits and pieces while researching one subject, resulting in a new entry being added to my list of prospective topics.

Step 5:

Decide the post is finished, and put it into my pending articles pile.

Step 6:

Dig through my pending articles pile, and add them to my list of scheduled posts.

Step 7:

You eventually see the article online.

Footnote

So how long does my workflow take?

My recent ‘Fairness in PTV fare evasion penalties?‘ post started as a draft back in December 2014, and required three separate editing sessions to polish up.

My ‘Where does Geelong’s sewage go?‘ was a much bigger job, being almost two years in the making – I started it way back in August 2013, spent some time on it in December 2014, then polished it off in July 2015.

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• When a fire hose crosses the railway track *
• Telling a racist where to go *
• What is the cheapest tollway account for Melbourne?
• Vision impaired and the green button *
• Dandenong line upgrade and probity concerns *
• Replacing the power jack of a Samsung NP305 laptop
• Melbourne Metro rail tunnel: how about some actual detail?
• Abandoned hospitals of Melbourne
• The company formerly known as National Mutual
• Melbourne’s abandoned skyscraper
• Comparing Melbourne’s two IMAX theatres
• ‘Jaywalking’ in the Melbourne CBD
• Melbourne’s freeway ‘ghost ramps’ *
• New speed cameras on the Monash Freeway
• Dodgy doors on Melbourne’s Comeng trains *
• The saga of Caroline Springs railway station
• Daylight savings time and your camera clock
• Melbourne’s abandoned airfield
• Still more shops at Southern Cross Station *
• Ardeer and the kink in the Western Ring Road *

My top post was one I published early in the year, digging into the story behind a viral image of a fire hose crossing railway tracks – the post seems to be getting a lot of traffic even today. Next up was my 15 minutes of fame when my story about confronting a racist guy on the tram ended up in the news.

Heading further down the list we find a number of railway themed entries, some older posts about abandoned buildings in Melbourne, and three old faithfuls – fixing the power jack of a Samsung laptop, the history of National Mutual, and a how-to for fixing digital camera timestamps after daylight savings time changes.

With only eight of my top 20 posts having been written this year, it goes to show the value that writing a “timeless” blog post can give.

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It also got a run in The Age – Yarra Trams investigates alleged racial abuse – which also got a number of views (at least until Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took over the front page again).

Media interest

My first mention in the media was in the Melbourne Express section of The Age at 7:34am. Journalist Angus Holland compiles the section, and he follows me on Twitter, which probably explains the fast response.

By 8am the flood of messages on Twitter started – first contact was another journalist from The Age, followed by Nine News dropping me a line at 9am. Soon after that I got a message from somebody else from Nine News, as well as a third journalist at The Age (turns out story leads at a newspaper get passed around during the course of the day, depending on which journalist is available).

Radio stations got into the act later on: around 11:30am somebody from 3AW wanted to get in touch, with Austereo (home of Fox and Triple M) dropping me a message at noon, and 774 ABC Melbourne a few hours later.

While Channel Nine was the first television station to contact me, it took a bit longer for the other two commercial stations to track me down: 7 News Melbourne didn’t message me until almost 2pm, while Channel 10 took a different tack – they got in touch via a little used email address and contact details tied to my domain name registration.

I wasn’t that keen to take up the radio and television interview requests, so I asked my friends on Facebook for a second opinion. One of them summed it up my concerns far better than I could have ever written:

You will have no control over what the message is, how the message is portrayed, and where it goes from there. The question is; what are you hoping to gain?

In the end, I only had a quick chat with Mex Cooper from The Age, and declined all of the television and radio interview requests.

Reactions

Following people’s reaction around the place, they fell into four groups:

• Well done, good on you for saying something.
• Public shaming of racist idiots makes my day.
• I wouldn’t get involved, who knows what they will do you and anyone else nearby.
• Defending the guy in question, stating that he is entitled to his opinion and I should but out.

In the case of the latter, there is a difference between whispering something ‘politically incorrect’ to your travel companion, and muttering it in a passive aggressive way to make the people around you feel uncomfortable and threatened.

People are entitled to believe whatever they feel like, but if you’re out in public sometims you just need to hold your tongue.

Further reading

In the mood to wade though pages of comments from Reddit users? Have fun.

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Turns out my recent post about more shops at Southern Cross Station scored a mention in the online only ‘Melbourne Express’ section of The Age.

You can find the page here.

An update

My February 25 blog post on Melbourne’s freeway ‘ghost ramps’ also got a mention in the same column.

You can find the page here.

And another

My March 11 blog post on the kink in the Western Ring Road got a mention.

You can find the page here.

Footnote

The ‘Melbourne Express’ section of The Age was launched on February 11, and is a live blog that runs from 6am and 9am, featuring random Melbourne items their journalists find on the internet. It reuses the name of a defunct Fairfax group newspaper, that was distributed for free at weekday mornings at suburban railway stations in Melbourne for a short period during 2001.

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The article, titled ‘Melbourne’s most accident-prone tram stop is in Ascot Vale‘ went live on the online edition of The Age at 12 noon on February 7, and gradually dropped down the front page as newer stories were posted.

Included in the article was a link to by blog, so my incoming traffic spiked considerably.

On an average day I get around 200 views of my site, with minor spikes if I post a new item that gets retweeted a lot on Twitter. However by the end of Friday, I had received over 2000 hits, with 800 more to come over the course of Saturday.

The last time I saw that much traffic was when I hit the front page of Reddit!

Footnote

Somebody posted the article from The Age to the /melbourne page on Reddit – this was my favorite comment.

famousninja

I just spent about half an hour just reading his blog. It’s strangely captivating, considering that I’m not really that interested in trains and such.

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• What is the cheapest tollway account for Melbourne?
• New speed cameras on the Monash Freeway *
• Melbourne Metro rail tunnel: how about some actual detail?
• Melbourne’s abandoned skyscraper
• Revisiting Melbourne’s clogged intersections *
• The wardriving tram and ‘hacking’ Myki machines *
• Melbourne’s plague of advertising covered bikes *
• The company formerly known as National Mutual
• Abandoned hospitals of Melbourne
• Melbourne’s abandoned airfield

Among the posts not published this year, I sense a pattern in my top 10 – lots of people are interested in abandoned buildings in Melbourne!

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It was also a period when Microsoft offered a product called ‘MSN Spaces’, allowing users to create their own blog and share the posts with their Messenger contacts. My first post was in May 2005, and I eventually posted over 100 entries before until I gave up on the site in July 2006.

Microsoft shut down MSN Spaces March 2011 and gave users the option to migrate their content to a new blog hosted at WordPress.com – I did just that but archived all of the content, embarrassed to make public what I had wrote as a teenager.

A few years later I’ve taken another look at my old posts and realised they aren’t half bad – so I’ve since decided to pull my finger out and import the good bits to this blog. They are pretty much as I published them back in my early days – except I’ve edited out my chronic overuse of parentheses.

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