Anyone having trouble with initial access to the forum?

Yes: ~10 sec to find the site, 20+ to log in, ~10 sec to show unread posts.

EDIT: and over 5 seconds to post this reply!

I’m still not convinced that the Chinese traffic isn’t causing problems. The firewalls have blocked over 250,000 hits from China in the last 24 hours. Having said that the forum seems pretty responsive to me most of the time. When it’s sluggish I find that other sites are sluggish to which suggests it’s my connection rather than the forum.

Edit: Reply posted in less than a second

Not the case here, the Forum has just been bad all day on Edge with no sluggishness on other sites. Logged out and tried Chrome: just as bad.

Edit: Back on Edge now and it’s getting worse. Just spent over 5 secs to read my messages and over 5 secs to send a reply.

Edit2: and 7 secs to post the last edit.

For what it’s worth.

Yesterday was the slowest ever.
Today I popped right in super fast.

That’s the weird thing. The server is doing the same thing every day. I didn’t make any changes in the last 24 hours either. The only thing I can see is that the number of attempts by China to access the forum dropped from 260,000 to 200,000 between the two days. That traffic should be blocked before it hits the server for the last 2-3 days so that shouldn’t be affecting it anyway. Consider me puzzled.

Me too. . .!

Appreciate your efforts, Chris. I’m sure it’s been slow in the past and we’ve all thought nothing of it. . .

P.S. Silly question: why are we told "Protected by: Forum Firewall

I’ve looked at the Forum Firewall messages before and they’re inserted by the mod but I couldn’t see a way to get rid of them without disabling part of what the mod does.

Thanks, Chris.

Although things have considerably improved where I still do see an slight delay of maybe between 5 and 10 seconds is the first access. Once on I have not had any issue with delays either browsing the forum or posting. Also as mentioned earlier I have not been logged out by the forum at all. Anyway for me the current status is perfectly liveable with. Thanks Chris for all your hard work and sorry I stirred this up originally :roll:

Stuart

I’m still digging as I get a chance. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of sessions (4-5000) in use. These are for logged in users and tend to last around 90 minutes so that’s a lot to be seeing in such a short times. That’s sent me back to look at the logs and I see a lot of BingBot accesses. The IP addresses for BingBot scans are supposed to come from MSN domains but a couple of IP addresses I’ve looked aren’t linked with any domain so I’m now wondering if there’s another ‘attack’ going on from someone pretending to be BingBot. Time for work soon but I’ll try to investigate some more this evening.

Now it gets tricky. Some of the IP addresses claiming to be BingBot are real (as verified by Bing) but some aren’t. The traffic from both looks pretty identical so it’s likely to be difficult to block one without blocking the real one. I can’t use robots.txt because it’s unlikely that fake bots will respect whatever is put in there anyway.

I’m still left wondering why all this is happening? Why would anyone want to attack an weather forum??

Luckily (?) I’m going to the dentist this morning so had a little longer to investigate. I’ve managed to find some IP sub-nets to block that seems to be stopping the fake bingbot addresses that are being used this morning. No doubt there will be more to block later :roll:

I think you must have spurred them on to greater efforts: I have to record that getting to the site, logging in and showing unread posts was the slowest I have ever seen this morning at about 0945 BST :frowning:

Edit: and about 10 secs to post this. . .

I just logged out and back in again and it too about 10 seconds to login. Not sure why anyone would not stay logged in forever as I have always done as I visit the site more than once per day. Still seeing about 10 seconds for first access after I boot the PC but then everything seems to work quite well with no significant delays.

Stuart

I think I’ve stemmed the flow of the fake BingBots for now. Instead of the webserver logs scrolling rapidly up the screen they now scroll in small increments so the load on the server appears to be much lower. Remains to be seen if that improves anything though.

Its lightning fast atm👍

It seems faster to me too. The number of active sessions is tumbling too. It was peaked at about 5000 when I first looked this evening. It’s down to 1700 and still dropping now. The active sessions is one indicator of how active the forum is so it’s about 30% of the earlier peak at the moment which is going the right way.

Sent you an email about an hour ago…I was getting a 522 error when contacting the website. Just now was able to connect and login. Thanks for all your hard work to keep the forum up and running Chris.

I know what caused the 522 error. Fixed now but I now need to look at the BingBot again. They might not be fakes but I need to calm them down.

BingBot seems to be throttled to a page per second now so lets see how that goes. I don’t know how fast it was going before but the log file is scrolling past slower than it was.