Irene McC
Legend
- Location
- CPT, South Africa
Works in Firefox but not in Edge (and I've been using Edge exclusively for this site till now)
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Feedback Site lag?
- Thread starter MountainMan79
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Works in Firefox but not in Edge (and I've been using Edge exclusively for this site till now)
- Location
- Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
- Name
- John ...
Irene, make sure that you are using "desktop" on your PC and "not desktop" on tablets, phones, etc. Android and its browsers no longer like using the Xenforo desktop site with any Chromium based browser (Edge, Chrome, Brave), as I eventually discovered. Firefox desktop worked just fine on my tablets, etc.
- Location
- Western Oz
Other than the 'parsing failed' error, this is one of the commonest issues I have encountered, so I doubt it has anything to do with your PC Irene.
Irene McC
Legend
- Location
- CPT, South Africa
Drag and drop is working (again) today using Edge browser
- Location
- Western Oz
Which seems to indicate it is indeed server load related.
Currently:
Total: 633 (members: 12, guests: 621)
Robots: 391
- Location
- Whidbey Island
- Name
- Lyle
I saw over 1500 "guests" earlier today. The site was not very responsive and had difficulty resizing photos.
- Location
- Whidbey Island
- Name
- Lyle
Another "guest" storm when I connected today. 1400+ guests and extremely sluggish front page loading. Is there a way to put bandwidth limits or latency penalties on robots and guests or just limit the number of guests to 400 or fewer?
- Location
- Switzerland
- Name
- Matt
Server response is definitely seriously affected. I tried uploading some images to check this - and two out of three attempts failed (and only the smallest of the three files was parsed successfully eventually).
I think we're witnessing kind of a "strategy change" in terms of illegitimate site access and/or usage, probably automated, at least in part. That said, it's still quite satisfying to know that actual spammers being mostly unsuccessful at registering and posting messages (we had one earlier today - but most are repelled).
However, the way the server's behaving makes me think we're seeing widespread scraping of images and/or other content; that's what would certainly lead to major performance issues compared to people just viewing the site, even if there were a couple of thousand ...
Actually, "guest" numbers went as high as 1750 about half an hour ago; they're now dropping fast; currently at less than half that. This makes me think that there's something timed about this - 18:00 GMT? I tried once more to detect a pattern concerning guest access, but other than the fact that there are quite a few dead-end access attempts coming from Amazon's own servers, there's nothing I can see, except for the fact that a few VPN services are obviously preferred for guest access to this site; I smell a rat right there ... But since I'm using a VPN myself, I guess it's hard to complain about this in general.
M.
I think we're witnessing kind of a "strategy change" in terms of illegitimate site access and/or usage, probably automated, at least in part. That said, it's still quite satisfying to know that actual spammers being mostly unsuccessful at registering and posting messages (we had one earlier today - but most are repelled).
However, the way the server's behaving makes me think we're seeing widespread scraping of images and/or other content; that's what would certainly lead to major performance issues compared to people just viewing the site, even if there were a couple of thousand ...
Actually, "guest" numbers went as high as 1750 about half an hour ago; they're now dropping fast; currently at less than half that. This makes me think that there's something timed about this - 18:00 GMT? I tried once more to detect a pattern concerning guest access, but other than the fact that there are quite a few dead-end access attempts coming from Amazon's own servers, there's nothing I can see, except for the fact that a few VPN services are obviously preferred for guest access to this site; I smell a rat right there ... But since I'm using a VPN myself, I guess it's hard to complain about this in general.
M.
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- Location
- Western Oz
Some reading today indicates that Cloudfare (site host) have a few tools to combat this sort of thing, although no doubt they will want the proverbial 'arm and leg' for extra services.
- Location
- Switzerland
- Name
- Matt
I checked the list again (well, a quarter of it). Most requests are obviously single IP hits - thus, probably following search results.
Most bogus or disruptive requests are either from large companies (I've seen more Facebook-related access this morning than yesterday), including Amazon itself. There are also a couple of apparently VPN-related data centers in Europe (Germany, Finland, others), Singapore (one of the main "culprits", a Huawei-owned data center), but mostly the U.S. and Canada we see a lot of seemingly untargeted hits from - I suspect those to be the origins of possible scraping operations (they seem to use random URLs as part of their requests, most of which will go nowhere but will still cause the server to throw errors).
So, while high "guest" numbers may be indicative of high traffic, they're only partially related to site performance. What angers me is that there are obviously some points of origin (i.e. IPs or IP blocks) that are most probably disruptive, but we can't do anything about them, at least nothing that's not complicated and time-consuming. Blocking VPN-related IP ranges may result in members losing access, for instance. It's definitely kind of frustrating.
On the other hand, obsessing about it won't change anything. So, if you feel the need to document things, please continue to do so. But I suspect that there's no easy solution out there, at least not an accessible one.
Here's another observation for you, though. Interestingly, whenever I start digging into things regarding the list, numbers quickly go down (after half an hour or so) ... We're already at about half the numbers that appeared when I started this morning. That opens up an interesting possibility: Tracerouting, IP pinging and WHOIS requests may drive some of those operations away, at least temporarily.
EDIT: In the past ten minutes, numbers have been surging again ...
M.
Most bogus or disruptive requests are either from large companies (I've seen more Facebook-related access this morning than yesterday), including Amazon itself. There are also a couple of apparently VPN-related data centers in Europe (Germany, Finland, others), Singapore (one of the main "culprits", a Huawei-owned data center), but mostly the U.S. and Canada we see a lot of seemingly untargeted hits from - I suspect those to be the origins of possible scraping operations (they seem to use random URLs as part of their requests, most of which will go nowhere but will still cause the server to throw errors).
So, while high "guest" numbers may be indicative of high traffic, they're only partially related to site performance. What angers me is that there are obviously some points of origin (i.e. IPs or IP blocks) that are most probably disruptive, but we can't do anything about them, at least nothing that's not complicated and time-consuming. Blocking VPN-related IP ranges may result in members losing access, for instance. It's definitely kind of frustrating.
On the other hand, obsessing about it won't change anything. So, if you feel the need to document things, please continue to do so. But I suspect that there's no easy solution out there, at least not an accessible one.
Here's another observation for you, though. Interestingly, whenever I start digging into things regarding the list, numbers quickly go down (after half an hour or so) ... We're already at about half the numbers that appeared when I started this morning. That opens up an interesting possibility: Tracerouting, IP pinging and WHOIS requests may drive some of those operations away, at least temporarily.
EDIT: In the past ten minutes, numbers have been surging again ...
M.
Last edited:
- Location
- Western Oz
It appears (although not reading in depth) that some of the onerous tasks you mention regarding IP etc. can be automated by the host, however as I mentioned the costs associated with those services may be an issue. I notice more and more sites using Capchta (not the annoying ' click all the photos with bicycles' type), the "I am human' click type.
- Location
- Switzerland
- Name
- Matt
I'm just trying to assess things - I suspect that there's already something going on in the background.
The Captcha idea is interesting - but only if it exclusively affects guest requests. However, some AI has been reported to beat Captcha every time - I read the headline only a couple of days ago. Anyhow, we've done our share of trying to gauge this; I will not make this digging into the list a pastime in any way.
M.
- Location
- Western Oz
No it's not very rewarding. I did a lot of that sort of thing about twenty years or so ago and it was very frustrating, as things kept changing.
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK.
- Name
- Charles
'Tis okay for me!
- Location
- Switzerland
- Name
- Matt
Just for the record: "guest" and "robot" numbers have both been quite low whenever I've looked over the last two days, and while I got the odd parsing error when uploading (only today), using the site was fine otherwise.
M.
M.
- Location
- Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
- Name
- John ...
Agree, Matt. It's been much more responsive the last few days.
