Server very slow for the past few hours

[Andrew Lee]

The server has been very slow for the past few hours. Thankfully with Cloudflare I have a clearer picture of what's going on.

The number of unique IPs have spiked from ~2k/daily to suddenly ~68k!

Total page requests spiked from ~20k to ~110k.

I have turned on "Bot Fight Mode" and "Block AI Bots" for a start.

Will be keeping a close eye to track progress, and also see what other options can be enabled to deal with this issue.

Please be patient in the mean time.

[Stephen Leibowitz]

Cloudflare captcha loop

[Andrew Lee]

Anyone having problems with CloudFlare?

Anyway, last night (14 Mar), there was a HUGE spike in traffic, and the website became unresponsive. I had to up the CloudFlare security level until it reached "I am under attack" mode before the spike subsided. It was way past bed time, and I must have spent over an hour trying to get it to work.

If you are seeing the "Verifying that you are a human..." interstitial page that CloudFlare injects when you are trying to access TPFC, that's the reason.

I will be leaving the security level as is until a better suggestion comes along.

[Midas]

If you are seeing the "Verifying that you are a human..." interstitial page that CloudFlare injects when you are trying to access TPFC, that's the reason.

I do, good to know the reason why...

FWIW, I had noticed traffic was up in the thousands yesterday but thought nothing of it since it's become normal every now and then in recent times.

[Stephen Leibowitz]

I do not claim to be an expert on this, but it seems that details about the spikes, if available, could be useful.

Did the register or login pages get a larger percentage of hits than usual?
ucp.php?mode=register
ucp.php?mode=login&redirect=index.php

Was the geographic distribution of connection attempts different than usual?

Are AI training bots trying to connect? If so, my previous suggestion might be worth a try.

Does the extra traffic come from a small number or range of addresses? If so, then perhaps contacting the originating ISP might help. Failing that, you might be able to blacklist the offending addresses.

[Andrew Lee]

Did the register or login pages get a larger percentage of hits than usual?
ucp.php?mode=register
ucp.php?mode=login&redirect=index.php

The hits are primarily attributed to "/forums/viewtopic.php" and "/index.php", which suggests that these are content scraping bots.

Was the geographic distribution of connection attempts different than usual?

The increase in traffic is mainly from Brazil.

Are AI training bots trying to connect? If so, my previous suggestion might be worth a try.

Thanks for the reminder. I just updated robots.txt as per your suggestion. The Cloudflare stats did not identify any known bots. 99.8% of bots are classified as "Unclassified".

Does the extra traffic come from a small number or range of addresses? If so, then perhaps contacting the originating ISP might help. Failing that, you might be able to blacklist the offending addresses.

Unfortunately not. The top source IPs are all from known bots (Google, Bing etc.) and the volumes are reasonable, suggesting that the extra traffic came from diverse IPs (much like a DDOS).