Hi guys,

Server has been quite slow the last couple of days, and it turns out its because the old.lemmy.today user interface was being hammered and scraped by bots. I turned them off now temporarily while i look into this.

In the mean time, enjoy a faster instance, hopefully… :)

Edit: And the user interfaces are back online.

Now everyone is rate limited on their real ip before hitting any of the alternate user interfaces. This means the web server can protect against bots hammering the site.

Currently it looks like its working. Both the default web site and the alternate user interfaces are fast again. Give the alternate ones a try if you are using a web browser to access the site. :)

  • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
    8·
    22 days ago

    …turns out its because the old.lemmy.today user interface was being hammered and scraped by bots.

    Of course it was bots.

    • mrmanager@lemmy.todayOPM
      10·
      22 days ago

      Very annoying. But big thank you for sending me that message about the slow server! :)

      This will be fixed eventually, just need to figure out a good config I think.

  • JawnZ@lemmy.today
    7·
    22 days ago

    thanks for posting about it, I was very confused.

    ps. If your username is an Arrested Development reference, I especially love it!

  • Admiral Patrick@lemmy.world
    6·
    22 days ago

    Yeah, that’s a very common thing with Mlmym, and a lot of instances have that issue. It’s also hard to rate-limit because all client connections to the API come from Mlmym’s server rather than the users.

    • mrmanager@lemmy.todayOPM
      5·
      22 days ago

      Yeah that was the exact issue. I figured I could just forward the real ip from the incoming connection to the container, but couldnt get it to work.

      There must be a way, I will keep looking.

  • JawnZ@lemmy.today
    2·
    21 days ago

    btw, I just noticed that old.lemmy.world has a Cloudflare captcha check (not sure if it’s only old or their main), I wonder if it’s to deal with the bot scraping?

    You mentioned IP rate limiting but it’s possible that the CF-captcha could help

      • JawnZ@lemmy.today
        1·
        21 days ago

        Probably difficult for me to capture, but I’m saying that WORLD is using the cloudflare captcha, so maybe an option to put on this instance?

        • mrmanager@lemmy.todayOPM
          1·
          21 days ago

          Aha sorry i misunderstood. :)

          I have increased the rate limit from 6 to 10 now, will see if it improves things.

          I dont really want to add cloudflare in front of the instance. Then we are depending on them all of a sudden.

          Leta tune the rate limiting a bit and see if we are happy.

      • postcapitalism@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        21 days ago

        Sounds good sir!

        I like the open federation (I think one instance was banned - not even sure which but must be deserved) and relaxed moderation.

        Thank you for your work. As long as we keep the bots and any prolific spammers off it’s a great model for the fediverse.

        • mrmanager@lemmy.todayOPM
          4·
          21 days ago

          Naah, we are still in perfect shape, 0 instances blocked and 0 instances blocking us: https://federation-checker.vercel.app/

          Compare with lemmy.world for fun. I mean, I understand a super large instance needs to do what it needs to do though. But there are nice bonuses to being small.