Salacious Kitty May 7 Share May 7 The site has been loading very slowly today. I thought it was just me (android 14/Chrome), but others on different devices are reporting the same issue. 6 1 Link to comment
Dimity May 7 Share May 7 I don't think this is connected to my computer as I am not experiencing this issue elsewhere. For most of the day each time I click on a new forum or a new thread within the forum there is a very long lag before the page opens. 3 1 Link to comment
mlp May 7 Share May 7 (edited) 16 minutes ago, Dimity said: For most of the day each time I click on a new forum or a new thread within the forum there is a very long lag before the page opens. Yes. This started yesterday for me. Sometimes the lag is 15-30 seconds. I'm not having issues anywhere but this site. Windows 10/Chrome/Xfinity Edited May 7 by mlp Add a comment. 5 Link to comment
dleighg May 8 Share May 8 (edited) Me too. Only this site; nothing else. Apple Mac Pro laptop Edited May 8 by dleighg 2 Link to comment
shapeshifter May 8 Share May 8 4 hours ago, CM-CrispMtAir said: I'm on it. Seems like it's better now? 1 Link to comment
mlp May 8 Share May 8 I don't know what you did, CM, but the problem seems to be fixed now. Thanks! 2 Link to comment
CM-BlueButterfly May 8 Share May 8 When it comes to technical issues, I'm largely the messenger/middle man but glad it has improved. 1 2 Link to comment
Dimity June 2 Share June 2 I am having long lags again as each page gets loaded. Not as bad as it was last time this happened but very noticeable. 1 Link to comment
dleighg June 2 Share June 2 We saw something like this a couple of weeks ago as I recall. When I click on one of my notifications, it might take 20 or more seconds to click through Link to comment
CM-BlueButterfly June 2 Share June 2 Primetimer was down a few days ago after an anti-spam plug-in was installed. There were some lingering issues after which were resolved by clearning cookies and caches. @dleighg @Dimity Please let me know if you've already tried that and if the issue persists. 1 1 Link to comment
dleighg June 2 Share June 2 I HATE clearing cookies for obvious reasons. But Chrome was due for an update and that seems to have solved the problem. Link to comment
Salacious Kitty June 3 Author Share June 3 The site is sluggish again, after yesterday's fix. This is a separate incident as far as I can tell. Cleared my cache, no change. Android 14/Chrome Link to comment
Dimity June 3 Share June 3 Hi I cleared my cache and the problem is still ongoing. I will continue troubleshooting at my end to see if this is my problem and not yours! Link to comment
SoMuchTV June 3 Share June 3 In case it's not already been reported, this is happening again (approx. 2:00 - 2:30 ET). Link to comment
surfgirl June 3 Share June 3 Still experiencing lags again this morning, using latest Firefox. Also happening on my phone. Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 3 Share June 3 FWIW it's fine for me right now (desktop). Besides the anti-spam thingy earlier, the real site impactor recently was a combination of five crawler bots gone mad (two from Alibaba in Hong Kong, and oddly enough, three from good ole' Amazon here state-side). And by mad I mean just hammering the hell out of this place (effectively a DDOS), ignoring the usual crawler limits general adhered to by well-behaved crawlers. Firewall dealt with that but I'll keep an eye on the logs and see if any more automated crawling BS has popped up again. CPU, memory, web server, and database performance metrics are all copacetic right now (unlike before...) 1 3 Link to comment
SoMuchTV June 3 Share June 3 2 hours ago, SoMuchTV said: In case it's not already been reported, this is happening again (approx. 2:00 - 2:30 ET). 2 minutes ago, AllAstronauts said: FWIW it's fine for me right now (desktop). ... Back to normal for me as well, a couple hours after my previous post. Link to comment
Salacious Kitty June 3 Author Share June 3 Back to normal for me as well as of this post. 1 Link to comment
Dimity June 4 Share June 4 (edited) Fine for me now as well! Edited to add: Spoke too soon. The above comment was yesterday, today it's back to being super slow again. Edited June 4 by Dimity 1 Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 4 Share June 4 And after I just got pinged moments ago to look, its fine for me so... You guys keep taking your car to the mechanic and they are finding nothing wrong :) If I get pinged *right* when it's happening their will be a better chance of catching it (if there is anything to catch). Otherwise I'll have to throw some history tracking up to catch what's what. 1 Link to comment
possibilities June 4 Share June 4 Whenever this happens to me, I always assum eit's an ad causing the site to hang. But of course there's no way to guess which one it is, so I just refresh the page and wait. It also might be a browser incompatibility? Some things that won't load in Firefox will do so in Chrome. Link to comment
SoMuchTV June 4 Share June 4 (edited) 4 hours ago, AllAstronauts said: And after I just got pinged moments ago to look, its fine for me so... You guys keep taking your car to the mechanic and they are finding nothing wrong :) If I get pinged *right* when it's happening their will be a better chance of catching it (if there is anything to catch). Otherwise I'll have to throw some history tracking up to catch what's what. Are you asking us to PM you if we see it happening? Or "@" you in a comment here? I know when we post in this thread/subforum, it often doesn't get approved for general viewing until hours (or days) later. FWIW, I've noticed it happening around 2PM ET the last couple of days (6/3 and 6/4). Things load, but much slower than usual. I can tell it's going to happen as soon as I open the site. When I come back in a couple/few hours, it's okay again. editing to tag @AllAstronauts since I’m not sure how/when you get notified about posts here. Edited June 5 by SoMuchTV 2 1 Link to comment
Salacious Kitty June 4 Author Share June 4 (edited) 4 hours ago, possibilities said: Whenever this happens to me, I always assum eit's an ad causing the site to hang. But of course there's no way to guess which one it is, so I just refresh the page and wait. It also might be a browser incompatibility? Some things that won't load in Firefox will do so in Chrome. I have an ad blocker, so that's not the cause. I am using Chrome exclusively, so I can't speak to other browsers, but based on others' posts here and elsewhere around the site, it seems this issue spans all browsers. Edited June 5 by Salacious Kitty 3 Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 5 Share June 5 Note to self, 1pm Central... (though I might be installing a water well at that time so...) - but yes, if this is a pattern, I'll be around at this time in the next day or two. I know there is a backup process that runs (not set up by me) and I wonder if it hits at that time daily. Another site I pseudo-manage has the provider run a full backup daily and when that hits the CPU will spike up by 50% or so for about 15 minutes. Not ideal but it is a low-traffic site so it doesn't matter - it also runs at 1am central so again, etc... 1 Link to comment
GHScorpiosRule June 5 Share June 5 @AllAstronauts the Site started to lag again around 11:45 AM ET. Still slow to load and to show notifications. 2 Link to comment
dleighg June 5 Share June 5 The slow response of clicking notifications is back. 1:23 pm Eastern. 1 Link to comment
ProudMary June 5 Share June 5 June 5th. 5:03 p.m. This is the first time I've been able to access the site in the past four hours. 1 1 Link to comment
CM-BlueButterfly June 5 Share June 5 I checked with AllAstronauts and, apparently, there were no immediately obvious/noticeable issues around 3 pm ET. AllAstronauts will do a more in-depth check. I haven't had any issues myself but I'm sorry that it's happening. I know how irksome it can be. 1 1 Link to comment
SoMuchTV June 5 Share June 5 4 minutes ago, CM-BlueButterfly said: I checked with AllAstronauts and, apparently, there were no immediately obvious/noticeable issues around 3 pm ET. AllAstronauts will do a more in-depth check. I haven't had any issues myself but I'm sorry that it's happening. I know how irksome it can be. It really seems to be establishing a pattern of issues in early to mid afternoon (ET) but that may have more to do with my usage patterns. All I can say is that during other time periods, I’m not seeing the issue. 4 Link to comment
shapeshifter June 6 Share June 6 (edited) Just to add another data point: I noticed lagging from at least 2pm-3pm EDT, but the pages did load after less than a minute delay with no timeout messages. It was enough of a delay that I would not have wanted to try starting a new thread. I do have an ad blocker. (Flashing, moving images and clips aggravate my migraines.) Edited June 6 by shapeshifter Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 6 Share June 6 So to give you an idea of how scrambled I am these days, when I previous stated that the prior sludge was from bots gone mad, I was right, but also wrong. Wrong in that I was thinking of a site I had *just* finished dealing with, and confabulated it with this site. Right in that... it's the exact same freaking thing here. So I gotta firewall stuff and so on. It's clear in a bit. My general thinking on the matter, not that this is any different than the last 20+ years of bots ignoring limits and noindex rules and the like, but AIs gotta eat, and if you want to feed AIs content, maybe you ignore crawl limits and robots and all that stuff because who is gonna stop ya? It's the stupid world we live in. 1 1 1 Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 6 Share June 6 Also, for you techies out there, viewing top -c output when you apply the firewall rules and see mysql use drop from 500+% to below 50%. Chef's kiss. I've watched and tracked well-behaved search bots on a <redacted> porn site running on this software and the amount of traffic can be stunning across google, bing, baidu, yandex, and others. Greater than 5000 bot/guest hits per minute, and this was just a single run-of-the-mill hobby site <albeit a well trafficked on>. You can imagine what bigger sites must see as far as bot traffic goes, but the thing is, it's all well-behaved. This is the second time this week I've seen these two Alibaba crawlers go cray-cray. Standard bad bot or AI harvesting is my guess. Link to comment
SoMuchTV June 6 Share June 6 5 hours ago, AllAstronauts said: So to give you an idea of how scrambled I am these days, when I previous stated that the prior sludge was from bots gone mad, I was right, but also wrong. Wrong in that I was thinking of a site I had *just* finished dealing with, and confabulated it with this site. Right in that... it's the exact same freaking thing here. So I gotta firewall stuff and so on. It's clear in a bit. My general thinking on the matter, not that this is any different than the last 20+ years of bots ignoring limits and noindex rules and the like, but AIs gotta eat, and if you want to feed AIs content, maybe you ignore crawl limits and robots and all that stuff because who is gonna stop ya? It's the stupid world we live in. 4 hours ago, AllAstronauts said: Also, for you techies out there, viewing top -c output when you apply the firewall rules and see mysql use drop from 500+% to below 50%. Chef's kiss. I've watched and tracked well-behaved search bots on a <redacted> porn site running on this software and the amount of traffic can be stunning across google, bing, baidu, yandex, and others. Greater than 5000 bot/guest hits per minute, and this was just a single run-of-the-mill hobby site <albeit a well trafficked on>. You can imagine what bigger sites must see as far as bot traffic goes, but the thing is, it's all well-behaved. This is the second time this week I've seen these two Alibaba crawlers go cray-cray. Standard bad bot or AI harvesting is my guess. I understand maybe one word of every five here, but it sounds like you’re telling us AIs are harvesting information from this site to build their knowledge base. If that’s the case, I have to wonder what they’re learning from all this! How to form opinions on every show that’s ever aired, I guess. 1 1 Link to comment
AllAstronauts June 7 Share June 7 Search index crawlers are always crawling everything. It's how Google and Bing and the rest generate their search index. And it's fine. They are all well-behaved. If they see a link on a page and that link has a little tag on it saying "nofollow" they will ignore that link and not see whats on the other side of it. If a webpage has a little tag that says "noindex", they will not index the page and move along to another page. And they do all this at a reasonable pace. Grab five or ten or 20 and then wait, and then repeat, and when the site is "done" being crawled they will come back days later and repeat to get new content to index. Rinse. Repeat. Now, this all requires that these guys are sane and behave. There is nothing stopping bad actors to ignore all that and just hammer your site, following every link, until they harvest everything. And maybe they come back later and repeat it. I can set up a crawler to crawl a site; university researchers crawl sites, reporters, other orgs, etc. Most people/orgs do not flood a website at computer speeds with 1000's of hits per minute to grab everything they can get immediately. When you spot this happening, all you can do is block them as best you can to stop the traffic from bringing the server to its knees. What is different these days is that besides search engines crawling for content, we have people building AIs. The crawling is the same, but the financial pressures on the corporate side, and the general dickish-ness of random neckbeards making their own AI's at home with a few video cards, means that - I'm assuming here of course - that there are now not just more instances of "things" crawling a website besides normal people, but there are now more of them "ignoring the rules" and just doing what they want. Gotta make that 3rd quarter bonus and that AI needs to be complete by then or your fired! I'm just some guy in a basement; what is anyone going to do? If they didn't want me crawling their site they would blocked me. And so on. An old problem, just likely amplified with all these AI's being gestated. 3 Link to comment
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