Forum Sluggish?

[cteno4]

Anyone noticing the forum being sluggish loading pages (like taking 15-60 seconds for a page load to finish) in the last few days? Been happening off and on here in DC, but martin’s not seeing it in Holland. May be regional data center issue, but just curious if others are seeing this in any other part of the world.

 

thanks,

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

I am noticing it a lot.  Sluggish to open the page and sluggish to open individual threads. Then occasionally everything opens crisply. Can be day or night.

[disturbman]

He is experiencing it too, he doesn't know what it's going on. Wolf and myself are also experiencing it.

[bill937ca]

Took two tries to get in.

[Martijn Meerts]

Hey hey!

 

I had a look at it, and I noticed we had some really aggressive bots and crawlers generating a fair amount of load on the server. I've blocked these bots now, so hopefully that will have fixed the forum not loading.

 

For the technically minded, the bots in question are Bytespider and Trendiction. The 2 of them are hitting the server several hundreds of times per minute. They ignore the robots.txt file, so I've now blocked them in the webserver's config. They are still hitting the server, but the webserver will now immediately stop them, so they won't trigger a full load of the page.

[cteno4]

Thanks Martijn! Makes sense.

 

Probably AI bots trying to pull data to create an Japanese train modeler chatbot! Soon the forum won’t need members just be a bunch of chat bots talking to each other psychotically! 
 

welcome to the brave new world…
 

jeff

[bc6]

All the bots left Reddit and came here lol. 

[katoftw]

I am getting timing out errors as the forum database is off-line.  Bit hit reload and it is back straight away.

 

I'd take a wild guess and say it's server issues. The pings are switching between main and backup data.

[Guest]

I messaged the admin(s) a few times over the past week about this issue, glad it wasn’t just me.

[cteno4]

They seem to be gone now. It was bots/spiders doing lots of page requests tying up the server. Martijn has blocked them so they shouldn’t be causing the server slow ups now.

 

please let us know if you have slow ups now.

 

jeff

[cteno4]

On 8/5/2023 at 11:53 PM, Bob Martin said:

I messaged the admin(s) a few times over the past week about this issue, glad it wasn’t just me.

Bob,

 

who did you contact and how? Nothing came through as far as we can tell.. For stuff like this please pm martijn or me.

 

jeff

[Guest]

1 hour ago, cteno4 said:

Bob,

 

who did you contact and how? Nothing came through as far as we can tell.. For stuff like this please pm martijn or me.

 

jeff

I used the “contact us” button at the bottom of the main page.

[cteno4]

@Bob Martin Ahh. Martijn thing this fell into spam hole as form emails are prone to do this way. Please just pm myself or martijn on stuff like this directly so it won’t potentially get spam holed and/or do a post to this forum with your issues (helps as others may chime in quickly with the same issue). For any content issues (ie spam or need a dupe post deleted, etc) you can also use the report content button up in the top right, staff is scattered around the world and all see that can first one seeing it can deal with it.

 

we are going to see if we can get a more durable way to do the contact us form. If not we will drop it as no good if it just gets spam filtered. It’s really meant for non member use for outside contact.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Yeah, for every actual email we get through the contact form, we also get about 100 spam mails. I tend to go through them, but sometime they already get blocked by the mail server itself, and never arrive in my inbox. In those cases I can't do much about it.

 

[Rod.H]

It happened again! Thought it was my connection but nope server went bye bye! It's currently back for me.

[tossedman]

It was sluggish here in Western Canada but now it's fine. Thanks fellas for figuring it out.

 

Todd

[bill937ca]

Very slow to open the board initially for a couple of days.

[cteno4]

Hmm been ok here in dc.

 

@bill937ca have you tired the “mark site as read” trick to clear the cashe?

 

jeff

[katoftw]

Rolling normal here in Oz also.