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aaa  7d ago (text post)   1564 thread views

The Motte is very very slow

Is it just me or lately The Motte has been getting very slow to load and occasionally timing out?

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It's not just you. Working on it. :)

(Should be better now, I'll let it sit for half an hour or so and see how it's going. More work may be needed.)

(Edit: Sigh, not solved. Still working on it.)

(This may now be fixed; I think we were just running on bad hardware.)

Was this an intentional DDOS attack on the site?

To be honest, I'm not sure. If it's a DDOS it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking like a misbehaving web crawler. On the other hand, if it's a misbehaving web crawler, it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking somewhat like a DDOS.

Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.

If this happens again, have you considered responding to the crawlers with the equivalent of the "banned chinese wall of text"

There's a bunch of problems here. Yes, China traffic spiked, but it didn't spike that much. Also, now that the analytics have caught up, it spiked a day or two before the server problems began, and everything's back to normal. So . . . was it bots? Eh, maybe, maybe not. And while I can get a long list of IPs, it's not clear that there was any significant pattern within that.

I see, I've heard from others there are a lot of ill behaved and dumbly written crawler bots coming from alibaba cloud/other asian market datacenters. So much so people are blocking whole country wide ranges. A funny anti-bot measure some one suggested to combat a HK bot was to reply with porn and tattle to the host/authorities. (vanilla Porn possession is a crime there)

Yeah I get a fair bit of traffic from china on my crappy little website, up 25% this month. It's at least half my traffic tbh and not a single actual Chinese user, at least not one who uses any mandarin... But LLMs that are trained then direct people to me, so there are swings and roundabouts.

On the other hand, if it's a misbehaving web crawler, it's a weirdly terrible one that's spending a lot of effort looking somewhat like a DDOS.

AI crawlers tend to do that. There are a number of complaints from smaller sites that are getting smothered by badly written crawlers collecting data for AI training.

Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.

Which strongly points to the above.

The thing that's weird about this, though, is that it ramped up gradually over a period of a week. And it's hard to believe that us specifically would get a massive increase in traffic over simultaneously such a long and a short period of time.

That said, I may have solved it; I think we were just on a crummy cloud computer, I recycled the node and performance is fine again. Gotta remember that for next time.

"Noisy neighbor problem" is a very real thing in the clouds.

Yeah. I'm very glad I set things up in a way where I could just move the servers easily.

Either that or we've gotten incredibly popular in China over the last week.

Prepare to be assimilated into DeepSeek.

That's just the Internet now. 99%+ of web traffic is AI crawlers that are 100x more aggressive than any search engine crawler used to be. Try https://anubis.techaro.lol/.

Blacklisting every Chinese IP address probably also works since anybody using this site from China ought to know how to use a VPN. But there are plenty of these bots outside China too, so that's only a middling solution.

And Chinese botmasters could just buy VMs at any non-Chinese cloud provider. Which they probably already do.

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