on friday i applied for the ebay program at cj.com… and got rejected rigth away by default.
so i wrote them an email why and how and what im trying to do and thats what i got back:

Unfortunately, at this time the eBay program only accepts publishers from Western/English-Speaking countries. Yet, if you write to ebayaffiliates (a) cj.com with your CJ account number and a detailed description(s) of your business model, method(s) of promoting eBay, and the amount of traffic you drive from the U.S., we may re-evaluate your application.

but lucky me im already successfully applied with the ebay affiliate program at affili.net.
means no money for cj.com.

UPDATE:

okay… wrong. i HAVE to deal with them because the german ebay affiliate guys cant answer me one straight question. the only thing they got straight was forwarding me to the ebay cj.com guys. no idea why… to stupid, to lazy or just bored, i dont know. but i dont think thats how a big company with an affiliate program should act.

oh and im still waiting for an answer on the ebay API developers board, since two weeks now. the only thing that happend was that some users tried to help with postings of “somehow” matching answers where ebay then replyes on those answers and not on my main question who started the thread. oh and of course me repeating my question every few days adding a “hello? anyone? knockknock? ebay?” each time at the first line.

annoying.

inspired by the horrible server config from auctionads i updated the adservers to lighttpd 1.5 AIO with linux-sendfile backend.

… and the maxmind db based geotargeting is now done with mod_geoip because mysql is fast but a C compiled lighttpd integrated module is a much faster, i guess. therefore i fixed the module so it works now with lighttpd 1.5 - people who want to use it will find the fixed mod_geoip.c for lighty 1.5 (including a description how to install it) on lighttpd.net

first as i read about auctionads hardware i had to laugh a bit… they using a coyote load balancer… thats something you wont touch with bare hands because it’s so freaking buggy its called the win95 of the load balancers… why not just a bunch of ips and round robin? thats so simple… and of course cheap dell boxes.

now i read they having +300 million ad impressions per day from all over the world. okay the world doesn’t count because they only serve u.s. ebay auctions but the clicks coming from everywhere anyway. oh should i mention that if you’re outside the u.s. and you click on an auctionads ad your landing page is the ebay search with the “keywords” set in the ad. yeah, no product links for non u.s. citizens. (i guess)

so i at least thought they must having some fine ass webservers running. something like lighttpd 1.5 with AIO or nginx… negative… okay, the hardware is probably good enough but just do this: curl -I http://ads.auctionads.com a few times:

Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-19
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10-19

Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) PHP/4.4.4-8+etch4 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4-8+etch4

Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) PHP/4.4.4-8+etch4
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4-8+etch4

i get those three servers. i really hope they fake those version numbers and server signatures because if its real… haha.

Search Results for: php 4.4.4 (page 1 of 83)

nothing more to say.

finaly i got round robin working perfectly!
naggerads can now serv ads load balanced from all 4 adservers.

4 x 3000 req/sec …. should be enough.

Server Software: lighttpd/1.4.13
Document Length: 851 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1000
Time taken for tests: 29.878148 seconds
Complete requests: 100000
Total transferred: 55626932 bytes
HTML transferred: 39063686 bytes
Requests per second: 3346.93 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 298.781 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.299 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1818.15 [Kbytes/sec] received

i stopped playing around with sqlite. why? because it sucks or im doing something really wrong.
20 minutes ago i started using the maxmind db for geotargeting. i got 140ms per request with sqlite, same after i moved it into the shared ram. guess how fast it is with mysql… 0.025 milliseconds or 25 microseconds - for mysql_query() -> return $array. that means mysql is 5600 times faster.

the guys in #sqlite on freenode.net tryed to tell me its because im using lighttpd with php-fcgi and thats why its so slow and i should better change to apache with mod_php.

yeah, exactly.

if someone wants to participate in the naggerads alpha program, please send me an email (alpha (a) naggerads.com) with your password and as many content sites as you have. (you dont have to place any ads. i just need the content sites to feed the crawler and test around.)

thx!

before the big traffic starts i want to make sure everything runs smooth, so i visited my colo today and installed two new servers, build in a additional networkcard for the database server and talked with the staff for a bit.

i also made a nice picture of the rack where naggerads is hosted (second row) :

Welcome to the NaggerAds Blog. Thats it.