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.
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)
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Notes -
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)
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