Slow response and 503 errors

[XexoX]

Am I the only one that has noticed things being sluggish here and getting 503 messages multiple times a day?

[Ut_ron]

Nope I’m getting it also.

[Ut_ron]

Though it’s back to normal for me at the present time.

[XexoX]

Though it’s back to normal for me at the present time.

Same here. For now. Fingers crossed it is over the sluggishness.

[trancher]

I'm thinking it has something to do with this. I noticed the same 503 errors and sluggishness the last few days, and I peeked at the bottom stats of people online, and these are extremely high for us. We usually average between 100 and 200, not 2K. Bots maybe? (Secretly hates that word.)

Numbers.png (34.66 KiB) Viewed 1405 times

[Bensbites]

I saw it too

[ronnie_suburban]

I'm thinking it has something to do with this. I noticed the same 503 errors and sluggishness the last few days, and I peeked at the bottom stats of people online, and these are extremely high for us. We usually average between 100 and 200, not 2K. Bots maybe? (Secretly hates that word.)

Numbers.png

It is most likely AI scrapers (aka bots) that tie up the site, mine it for information and make it hard for actual humans to reach it. This happened at another board I frequent and it is highly annoying. We had to block them in a number of ways -- some manual, some automated.

[XexoX]

Well today had the max so far, 3709 connected today. Around 1750 at the moment. Great Zeus, what are all these "people" doing here?

[trancher]

Well today had the max so far, 3709 connected today. Around 1750 at the moment. Great Zeus, what are all these "people" doing here?

Ogling Ronnie's meal prep...?

[ex1580]

Here I thought we had filled up the internet with food pictures.

I saw a SQL error on one of the messages which indicated that there were too many connections. It looks like aggressive bot/AI traffic which will need to be blocked or limited somehow. That can be a bit of a whack-a-mole game though if they are determined.

There is a lot of information on how to do this if you search and it makes me smile when the google AI tells me how to do it. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+ ... c+on+phpbb

[trancher]

Here I thought we had filled up the internet with food pictures.

I saw a SQL error on one of the messages which indicated that there were too many connections. It looks like aggressive bot/AI traffic which will need to be blocked or limited somehow. That can be a bit of a whack-a-mole game though if they are determined.

There is a lot of information on how to do this if you search and it makes me smile when the google AI tells me how to do it. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+ ... c+on+phpbb

Thanks for that information, Ex.

Last week, another forum I visit, had the same problem with too many bots soaking up resources. There the service "Alibaba Cloud" was blocked by the hosting provider, according to the admin and that resolved the problem.

Do you think that these are malicious in intent on any level, Ex? It's weird that this activity seems to be strongly concentrated at certain times of the day, and even for a few days stringed together and then, from what I witnessed of the previous two days, there was virtually nothing, and I thought the problem had actually been fixed.

[ex1580]

Here I thought we had filled up the internet with food pictures.

I saw a SQL error on one of the messages which indicated that there were too many connections. It looks like aggressive bot/AI traffic which will need to be blocked or limited somehow. That can be a bit of a whack-a-mole game though if they are determined.

There is a lot of information on how to do this if you search and it makes me smile when the google AI tells me how to do it. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+ ... c+on+phpbb

Thanks for that information, Ex.

Last week, another forum I visit, had the same problem with too many bots soaking up resources. There the service "Alibaba Cloud" was blocked by the hosting provider, according to the admin and that resolved the problem.

Do you think that these are malicious in intent on any level, Ex? It's weird that this activity seems to be strongly concentrated at certain times of the day, and even for a few days stringed together and then, from what I witnessed of the previous two days, there was virtually nothing, and I thought the problem had actually been fixed.

I doubt it's malicious. I mean, it could be, but it's far more likely that some school told their students to go train a Large Language Model and this is just one of the topics (or some similar scenario). It would be nice if they respected the robots.txt file so you could opt your site out, but they usually don't. I fear more sites will require login or some "proof of human" to view the content if this continues. In the meantime the web application firewall will be very helpful. It's too bad there isn't some sort of standard setting on the servers to prefer logged in users and give the bots the error messages when the server is too busy.

[taz575]

Mods banned a few spammers and it started shortly after that, not sure if it's related or not?

[trancher]

Mods banned a few spammers and it started shortly after that, not sure if it's related or not?

I've seen retaliatory behavior from banning spammers in the form of massive bot registration and immediate spam flood posting, so it's not out of the question.

[ex1580]

Surly not out of the question but it has been my experience that it's easier to "not poke the bear", so to speak. Ban the users who are spammers/bots/trolls/etc as needed. Quote the forum rules if needed, but don't get emotionally involved. In fact, it's better to not respond to their queries at all because if they get a response it will likely motivate them to continue.

Dealing with bots/AI hitting the site is a separate issue to me, mostly due to how it's handled technically. The good thing is that there are many forums running on this software and many of them run into the same issues so the methods are pretty well documented, albeit a moving target. I feel like right now that target, of how to deal with these issues, is moving pretty fast unfortunately.

Think happy thoughts! The only reason many people are here is that this forum is not full of garbage and @sshats.

[taz575]

Yeah, we just ban typically and not get into any conversations with the spammers/bots, etc. or those whose posts get removed for obvious reasons.

We can add a note to banning/dis approving posts, but I usually don't for that reason!

[ChefKnivesToGo]

I did some maintenance on the forum earlier today. Hopefully the work will speed up performance and reduce error messages. I’ll keep at it.

[billk1002]

First time in 3 weeks, NO 503 Error!!!!

Thank you Mark...

[ChefKnivesToGo]

When I went in to clear the cache I noticed several Meta bots were listed.

The hosting company thought it might be related to the like/dislike extension.