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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.

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.