Super slooooooooooowwwww site

[Krawk]

Site is running very slow. Server issues? Site under attack?
No thank you, I don't need a lesson on how hops between me and the destination works. Just asking a simple question.

[Radiocomms237]

Really slow here this morning as well. Cloudflare says it's a host problem.

[Radiocomms237]

Now a couple of hours later and it seems to be back to its old self.

[Billycar11]

honestly starting to think it was an attack
user number were in the 700-900 range when it was slow at off peak hours.
the normal amount i usually see is 300-500

[Rojma]

Same here. Site has been super slow for me for a couple of weeks. I am also using CloudFlare for DNS so maybe its CloudFlare related?

[Woodstock]

Unfortunately, it depends on what "the other guys" are doing. It's possible that 700-900 "people" are simply reading EVERYTHING, one message at a time, indexing things, but the legitimate search engines are NOT doing that. I'm guessing some sort of attack is going on, but it isn't attempted posting of messages.

In total there are 660 users online :: 5 registered, 1 hidden and 654 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[Radiocomms237]

Whatever the reason, it seems to be getting worse. It seems to be worst in the early morning and in the evening (UTC)...



Currently:

In total there are 677 users online :: 5 registered, 0 hidden and 672 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 4394 on Sun Oct 24, 2021 5:23 pm

[dcoke22]

I wonder, is it possible to rate limit how quickly a guest can click through on the forum? I don't know if that'll help and I don't want to make the site unusable for guests, but it is sorta unusable now.

I wonder if someone is very clumsily scraping the site to feed into a training set for a LLM?

[Woodstock]

Ooooo... an artificial intelligence engine for ripping disks? Interesting thought... Although, it would primarily be learning how to ask questions about disks that don't read properly, rather than how to get around that.

[Rojma]

Site looks like its working ok again. Maybe problem was related to this?

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33919

[d00zah]

Site looks like its working ok again. Maybe problem was related to this?

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33919

Don't know that the outages were related, but saw this from the mods on another forum (there were a few) during the same period:

Just a quick post to apologise for the forum outage earlier today.

We were being bombarded by several search bots (ClaudeBot being the main culprit). The bots completely ignored the robots.txt file and pushed us way over our resources.