Forum performance 7/5/2025

[xantia_v6]

This forum (and the BXC forum which runs on the same server) has been bombarded with requests from guest users using Vietnamese IP addresses. I noticed it yesterday and blocked several address ranges, but they have been even more prolific today, with a peak of about 5500 requests in one minute, which the forum database service could not handle.

I have blocked some more address ranges as a temporary measure, and will see if I can find a more elegant solution.

[Paul-R]

I've noticed some occasional long delays over the past few days (most recently about ten minutes ago) and now we know why. Thanks for the update.

[Michel]

Thanks for the update and your efforts as always Mike, much appreciated.

[xantia_v6]

We are still having issues with malicious traffic on this server, I am still trying to characterise it.

[myglaren]

Very quick here this morning.

[Paul-R]

I'm not currently having any problems.

[mickthemaverick]

It has been up and down for me, rangeing from instantaneous to whirlygig for a minute or two since around 6am

[xantia_v6]

I am busy blocking IP address ranges from Vietnam and Indonesia that are causing all the traffic. It is fortunate that we don't have any active users in those countries, so it makes filtering easier. The problem is that the ISPs in that region typically have very small address blocks, so there a lot of them. I have manually checked and blocked 163 address ranges so far.

[myglaren]

Forum is fast for me but Chromium has been downloading for half an hour and only 12% complete.


Ed: The Chromium download took two hours. Normally takes about a minute.

Forum has been a bit variable.

[Paul-R]

Was very slow refreshing 5 minutes ago at 13:28. And then it's fine again.

EDIT

Oh no it isn't. Clicking on the submit button for this post led to a 1 minute wait for a reaction.

[xantia_v6]

Yes, there is something going on...
I think that I have a temporary band-aid but there might still be some slow-downs and outages.

[xantia_v6]

It seems that the bots have got bored and moved on to someone else.

[xantia_v6]

I have made some configuration changes today, and they are temporarily causing email delivery problems to Gmail accounts. This is affecting notifications and user confirmation emails. I believe it will sort itself in a few hours and I will manually resend the confirmation emails tomorrow.

[wurlycorner]

I’m admin on another car forum and we don’t tend to get those kind of attacks (guest users) but we have had a rush of bots trying to register spam fake accounts in the last couple of weeks.

[Paul-R]

I'm an admin on a forum and I have to deal with bot registrations being placed in the pending queue all the time. They're instantly identifiable because they put meaningless two letter "words" such as KF and VE into the "My location" and "My setup" boxes. I then take the opportunity to ban their email address and often use a wild card to ban an entire email address domain.