Forum is crawling again

[Ajay]

Is it computer/tech oriented?

Not impressed. 62 million posts over 1.1 million threads and 2 million members is only one of the boards I use. And a large number opf those threads have 10s of thousands of posts in just the last year or less. They get hundreds of new members weekly. Some members with less than 5 years time in have close to 100,000 posts.

Most of the threads I see here are quite old and current day-to-day traffic is minimal. People here with close to 100,000 posts have been here for 20 years.

 

[lantis3]

Just checked forum's online activity

Current visitors

forums.anandtech.com

There are less than 6 pages of members logged in
500+ pages of guest visitors and 60 pages of robots in the past hour.

Each page = 20 people.

So in the past hour there are:
120 members
10,000 guest visitors
1200 robots.

 

[soulcougher73]

this is getting ridiculous

 

[cytg111]

I've noticed a lot of sites using more and more cloudflare captchas lately, especially any time I try to browse videocardz on my phone. Is there something happening on the internet in general? If videocardz is holding behind cloudflare captcha for mobile users, and with the AT forums lagging, I would assume there is some kind of spam bot-net being deployed against tech sites en-masse.

If this were some kind of forum software problem like we hit some kind of overflow with the number of concurrent users, posts, or threads, I doubt it'd be intermittent like it is.

Really feels like DDOS, but maybe its just Occam's razor? Some bad browser plugin could be making people refresh more than they should?

This is persistent across chrome firefox and edge, adblock, noscript or naked.. Same result.
It's a simple fetch("anandtec.com/forum/page....") that takes forever, so it looks like its 100% serverside forum software doing the lagging. (be it due to ddos or whatever)

 

[cytg111]

Just checked forum's online activity

Current visitors

forums.anandtech.com

There are less than 6 pages of members logged in
500+ pages of guest visitors and 60 pages of robots in the past hour.

Each page = 20 people.

So in the past hour there are:
120 members
10,000 guest visitors
1200 robots.

10.000 visitors? God damn. If they're all constructing deep dive searches on the database or something like that.

Anyway, it'd just be nice to know what's up, the staff is just like "there's a problem, we're looking into it"... we're a tech site ffs, we can handle the truth .

 

[Markfw]

This is persistent across chrome firefox and edge, adblock, noscript or naked.. Same result.
It's a simple fetch("anandtec.com/forum/page....") that takes forever, so it looks like its 100% serverside forum software doing the lagging. (be it due to ddos or whatever)

Except. I have seen message that its waiting on onesgnal.con, or something metrics or google analytics or forums.anandtech.com. Its a variety of things its waiting on, but yes, it could be that the forum script is slow, and it just says that. I have reported all the messages I have seen, to no avail.

 

[lantis3]

My observation is that a lot of time forums.anandtech.com/service_worker.js alone took several seconds to load.

and what is this ml314.com ?

 

[cytg111]

Except. I have seen message that its waiting on onesgnal.con, or something metrics or google analytics or forums.anandtech.com. Its a variety of things its waiting on, but yes, it could be that the forum script is slow, and it just says that. I have reported all the messages I have seen, to no avail.

My observation is that a lot of time forums.anandtech.com/service_worker.js alone took several seconds to load.

and what is this ml314.com ?

Mark I've run it maybe 100 times and all I have observed is what lantis3 is reporting... And the reason that java script is slow is cause it's hanging in that fetch() I was talking about just before. It's the core site that is slow as snails.

 

[Markfw]

I was just trying to like your post and got this: That is pretty pathetic

 

[cytg111]

Since the nginx proxy is performing fine, its the server behind it that screws up and gives the occasional 502 bad gateway. I assume this is a timeout. I also deduce that whatever *it* is, is synchronous in nature. I know little of what a modern webserver hosting a site like this would want to integrate with besides a database(that would be synchronous in nature)?
As the code running on the actual webserver must be pretty simple in nature, a bulletin board is not rocket science, I assume it's the database that cant keep up. Whenever I've had a database not perform on me it's cause it's running disk intensive and whatever it's doing is not in memory.

So. Staff. Is it the database?

 

[Drach]

502 and 504's all day today and yesterday. Seems to be fine @ 3:30am pacific time.

The main site Anandtech.com has no issues. Obviously different servers.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Yeah man this is the worst it's been for me. Getting to the point where I am hanging out on the *Steam* forums and lemme tell you it smells like Gamergate in there...

 

[Ken g6]

10.000 visitors? God damn. If they're all constructing deep dive searches on the database or something like that.

They do seem to be looking at a variety of very old threads.

I've noticed a lot of sites using more and more cloudflare captchas lately

I'd hate to see that happen here. I use so many blockers that I simply can't convince CloudFlare that I'm human.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's been bad for a while now, and for much longer periods. Before it was only for like an hour at night, now it's all day on and off.

 

[cytg111]

They do seem to be looking at a variety of very old threads.

I'd hate to see that happen here. I use so many blockers that I simply can't convince CloudFlare that I'm human.

How do you deduce this?
If true then that is most likely it! And thus DDOS. I mean my patience would definitely grow a couple of meters if I knew for sure that it was that.

 

[Steltek]

and what is this ml314.com ?

It is a B2B data aggregator and tracker. Collecting and selling your data....

 

[biostud]

Someone is using the forums to train their AI model

 

[lantis3]

Anandtech and Tomshardware both are owned by Future PLC, both are using XenForo forum software, hosted by the same Vultr hosting company. Though not a Tomshardware forum member, it seems its members are not complaining forum's performance. So what's going on here?

 

[cytg111]

w

Anandtech and Tomshardware both are owned by Future PLC, both are using XenForo forum software, hosted by the same Vultr hosting company. Though not a Tomshardware forum member, it seems its members are not complaining forum's performance. So what's going on here?

Well, toms is issuing the exact same javascript and the same fetch() operation is taking 160ms compared to ours 6-20s

 

[cytg111]

Ok this is it. It's DDOS. It has to be.

Look at Toms guest list

Current visitors

forums.tomshardware.com

Look at ours

Current visitors

forums.anandtech.com

Difference?

 

[sdifox]

Yay it's snappy again. Hope it lasts.

 

[Shmee]

Yeah seems better at the moment.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

ANANDTECH FORUMS IS BACK BABY!

FOR THE NEXT 45 MINUTES!

 

[BoomerD]

Yay it's snappy again. Hope it lasts.

Yeah seems better at the moment.

At the risk of speaking too soon…and jinxing things…it DOES seem like the site is firing on all 6 hamsters at the moment.

 

[WilliamM2]

At the risk of speaking too soon…and jinxing things…it DOES seem like the site is firing on all 6 hamsters at the moment.

Didn't even last an hour...