Thank you for restoring the site

[gnume]

@Graymist Thank you for restoring the site
if i may ask what had happened to make the site unreachable the last week or so ?
also for your information right now i still have slow access / loading time

[Greymist]

Hey o/

Sorry I've been unwell this week so at first I didn't notice the site was down - even though I have uptime notification emails....which google has started filtering to the unimportant section of my emails - and once I noticed I just restarted the service thinking nothing more of it. It wasn't until yesterday when I checked the site and noticed it was slow/you message.

Anyway, down to the cause: I'm not sure why it was originally down, apache was unresponsive the first time, so I stop/started it, the slowness though appears to be due to some requests against the phpBB instance causing high load in the mariadb (sql) instance.

I'm not sure if the version I was on has some bug allowing the service to be DOSed, but I've upgraded phpBB to the latest version, and removed extra services I was hosting on the same server. Will monitor to check the same issue doesn't reoccur (let me know if it does)

[Sherman]

Still very slow here.

There has been a lot of discussion in the tech world lately about AI scraper bots being very ... impolite with their scraping, I don't know if this is what's causing your issues, but if it is, you may need to look at using something like Cloudflare or Anubis or similar.

[Greymist]

I was going to put sennadar behind Cloudflare previously, but I don't control the domain (managed by Fel), and I would need to update the name servers to point to Cloudflare, so I didn't get around doing that (I probably should at some point, but I'm lazy )

I checked on the phpBB forums and people are talking about hits from Alibaba IP ranges causing the issue - which matches what I'm seeing - so I've blocked Alibaba. Will maybe implement something more comprehensive if I'm seeing the issue again (like enabling CDN/caching for non logged in users).

Fingers crossed it takes this time (what's annoying is I'd put much more effort in to this at work, as I implement cloud solutions, but I'm not so rigerous in my personal life).

[Fel]

Thanks Grey.

I just got home from Maine, btw. 2 weeks in cold, rainy, gray "spring" that passes for not winter there.

[Wolfee]

Thanks for restoring services - what was the SLA again? I was actually getting concerned to be honest.