Slow Connection or Slow Server?

[RickLewis]

An update. Bora thinks he MAY have fixed the speed problem but we'd appreciate your help in spotting any unexpected side effects of his cure.

As Seeds and Gary pointed out, there are absurdly high numbers of visitors to the forum much of the time at present, presumably most of them being bots. Bora doesn't think it is a deliberate attack - he thinks they are perhaps doing large scale machine learning using the posts here, god help us. It's only a theory but anyway...

... Bora discovered that there is a table in the forum software that contains records of all forum visits, however casual. Due to the vast number of recent visitors it had filled up to the point of containing about 700,000 records, thus taking up a large amount of memory. So Bora deleted all of those, and the forum speeded up again. After half a day, the table already had 40,000 records again. So Bora deleted them. A couple of hours later, it again had 20,000.... so Bora deleted those etc. But this isn't sustainable, so Bora has now written a routine to automatically empty that table at regular intervals.

To minimise any inconvenience for users (such as being suddenly logged out in mid-posting), Bora's routine does not delete table records relating to signed-up forum members, only those relating to guests. So far, so good. However, he emphasises that he doesn't yet fully understand all the effects this might have on other parts of the forum program. Therefore he would welcome people posting in this thread about any unexpected behaviour they see here. (Of the forum software. Not of forum members - we are already used to that). With luck there won't be any, but let's see.

[Atla]

My guess would be that one of the AIs received an update that makes them scour internet forums for whatever reason. Not machine learning, just search. There seems to be a roughly equal number of these bots in every subforum, maybe they are scouring every single topic.

[iambiguous]

There are forums for forum administrators: https://www.theadminzone.com/

With posts like this one: https://www.theadminzone.com/threads/wi ... ms.154797/

Perhaps other forum administrators can offer suggestions regarding a problem like this.

[phyllo]

An update. Bora thinks he MAY have fixed the speed problem but we'd appreciate your help in spotting any unexpected side effects of his cure.

As Seeds and Gary pointed out, there are absurdly high numbers of visitors to the forum much of the time at present, presumably most of them being bots. Bora doesn't think it is a deliberate attack - he thinks they are perhaps doing large scale machine learning using the posts here, god help us. It's only a theory but anyway...

... Bora discovered that there is a table in the forum software that contains records of all forum visits, however casual. Due to the vast number of recent visitors it had filled up to the point of containing about 700,000 records, thus taking up a large amount of memory. So Bora deleted all of those, and the forum speeded up again. After half a day, the table already had 40,000 records again. So Bora deleted them. A couple of hours later, it again had 20,000.... so Bora deleted those etc. But this isn't sustainable, so Bora has now written a routine to automatically empty that table at regular intervals.

To minimise any inconvenience for users (such as being suddenly logged out in mid-posting), Bora's routine does not delete table records relating to signed-up forum members, only those relating to guests. So far, so good. However, he emphasises that he doesn't yet fully understand all the effects this might have on other parts of the forum program. Therefore he would welcome people posting in this thread about any unexpected behaviour they see here. (Of the forum software. Not of forum members - we are already used to that). With luck there won't be any, but let's see.

What's the pattern of activity of a typical "guest"?

Are they all coming from the same or similar IP addresses?

[RickLewis]

No, they come from many IP addresses. We do also have ways of blocking particular IP addresses, so if the spammers all came from a small number of addresses it would be much easier to stop them. We have blocked a few addresses that seemed to have particularly large numbers of spambots.

[Gary Childress]

1706 users, 1699 of them guests. when I looked a minute ago.

I've had a few bumps in the virtual road. It's kind of touch and go. I think once I had a somewhat long pause with the of the hourglass a few minutes ago. The lags seem to be a little inconsistent right now with some being longer or shorter than the previous.

[Gary Childress]

OK. It's back to instantaneous.

[MagsJ]

.

..the site’s back up, I see.

[Harbal]

.

..the site’s back up, I see.

Kind of. It logs me out every time I click something.

[Impenitent]

hopefully the site is working now

-Imp

[attofishpi]

I can't get on to the forum, nothing will load. I can't login or make a post even.