Server slow ...

[whole diary]

[grahame]

Can it be confirmed that the option to stay logged in has been removed? I only seem to be getting 360minutes now as an option.

No - option remains unchanged.  I just logged out and in again



The only recent change to timers that I have made was to increase the "courtesy edit time" from 5 to 10 minutes - that's the time you can go back and alter a post after it is first made before it flags as being edited.  It is possible that a fellow admin made a change somewhere to some other timer or option, but I would be surprised if any of my colleagues did that without notice.  The front page cookie timer needs to be more generous, but that's unchanged since January; it says 24 hours but occasionally you may be given a little less.

[RailCornwall]

Sorry, The timer I was attempting to change was in the post password reset section not there. All is good now.

[grahame]

An update - I have been quiet on reporting for ten days, but never the less monitoring and tweaking. 

* At three minutes after every hour, our server had been taking a backup copy of Coffee Shop databases and to ensure table integrity in the backups, that has locked the forum for up to a minute. There have also been two daily backups of the image database and those have also locked the forum.  The frequency of the coffee shop database backups has been reduced to every 4 hours, and the image database backups retimes to what I believe are quieter times of day.  The "lock"s still happen and won't be going away.

* I have tidied up a lot of other stuff on the shared server from my old IT training days and so a number of other loads not associated with the Coffee Shop are reduced

* Very common images across many of the pages we serve are now looked after by the receptionist who has them in her draws rather than needing to refer to the workers every time.  There are still some spikes where substantial numbers of images are called up at the same time and some effort continues there.

* The GDBR / approval database from the new look front pages grows and can slow down performance when we check on every page "do I know you"?  At present I'm trimming this database manually every few days, but looking to improve that so that it's done automatically every night

[bobm]

Draws or drawers? 

[grahame]

Christmas Eve - what a wonderful day for the server to be running slow with what looks like an attempted Denial of Service attack.

Server may be a bit slow as I find out what's broken the recent sweet running

[grahame]

Keeping tabs on bots and their sucking of resources has felt like climbing an never ending staircase ...



and you may recall on Christmas Eve the server was stuggling:

A test on Christmas afternoon slashed the loading, but that's been at the expense of turning away a lot torn arguably-good indexing which could hurt our visibility if it's to continue long term. However, I put in an experimental skeleton of code at lunchtime to provide litewait answers to bots (sorry to members who got error messages for a few minute) and I will be putting something more substantive in that skeleton over coming days.   Theory goes that members and guests shouldn't see a difference - except the diference you may see is a slightly faster response.

[Mark A]

Can't recall if I've mentioned it. Having used Statcounter for site stats for yonks, recently they've needed to introduce a slew of tools to weed out visits by various bots and have issued at least two newsletters to users to keep us informed about what they're up to.

Mark

[grahame]

"Denial of service" activity this evening ... I think I have dealt with it ... sorry the site was working like glue if at all for you earlier. Looking better now but time will tell.

[grahame]

"Denial of service" activity this evening ... I think I have dealt with it ... sorry the site was working like glue if at all for you earlier. Looking better now but time will tell.

40,000 requests yesterday evening from one origin ...

This IP address has been reported a total of 154 times from 63 distinct sources. [deleted] was first reported on November 19th 2025, and the most recent report was 1 day ago

A spectacular array of reports - "Bad Bot", "Hacking", "Brute Force", "Web App Attack".  Normally the access ceiling I have installed on the Coffee Shop would limit such attacks to a relatively few attempts, but very occasionally the process itself gets tied up.   Very quick fix once I realise what's going on

[grahame]

Ooops - sorry about some slow running this afternoon ... 86,000 requests from a single AI learning bot ... to give you an idea, the second most active visitor has made just 2,400 requests.   The servers copes well for the most part - though your may have seen the occasional "Bad Gateway" as the receptionist tries to contact a very busy worker

[Chris from Nailsea]

Thanks, as ever, for your work sorting that out, grahame.

It's all a foreign language to me, as an innate Luddite.

[bobm]

In a way it proves the wealth of information here that AI wants to plunder it for their memory banks.    However it peeves me they are using our resources for their benefit. 

[grahame]

In a way it proves the wealth of information here that AI wants to plunder it for their memory banks.    However it peeves me they are using our resources for their benefit. 

Agreed - and the "bonus" (I commented on my personal message / blog) is that people find us - though these days largely as guests rather than signing up as new members.  Indeed - it's frustrating to look something up word-wide-web only to be referred back to out own site as the best source.

The number of lines in our log file (request count) tripled in the 24 hours to 03:30 GMT this morning on our worker server - quite remarkable how it stood up!

Code:

wellho@www:~/elogs$ wc -l ac_2026050*
    400265 ac_20260501
    357949 ac_20260502
    368664 ac_20260503
    372534 ac_20260504
    319975 ac_20260505
   1218313 ac_20260506