Super slooooooooooowwwww site

[Jayrcee]

I've been getting really slow loading times just in the past few days.

[privacy_user_mkv]

I also noticed the site being unresponsive. I actually work in tech on large websites. Maybe I could help!

[Woodstock]

Possibly, but...

Part of the problem seems to be Cloudflare, and a big part seems to be that thousands of individual IPs sometimes seem to attack the forum. For example, currently, there are 3600 "guests" (unlogged in users) accessing the page. In terms of people, we're talking maybe 50 to 100, the others are machines doing various things. This doesn't include the Google BOT indexing the forum... it's relatively benign.

Cloudflare has some major screw-ups attributed to it from time to time, but the site itself is on a shared hosting server that has multiple clients to serve, so there is a limit to what you can get for an individual client.

[kaysee]

The Cloudflare error pages that were displayed over most of yesterday indicated that the connection through Cloudflare was fine, but the forum server was not responding. That suggests that Cloudlare was responding normally, and probably fighting DDOS attacks as usual, but the forum server was having problems.

[AstralWanderer]

Been encountering a cluster of Cloudflare 522 and 525 errors recently, with their error page pointing the finger at forum.makemkv.com.

Given the large number of reported visitors, I had a look at makemkv's robots.txt file - and, aside from comments, it's empty. No restrictions or limitations on search engine spiders or AI scrapers at all. Now there are presumably restrictions set via Cloudflare, but having some in robots.txt would reduce initial connection attempts (at least from well behaved crawlers).

So cutting and pasting another robots.txt, say from the example listed on Using robots.txt in order to optimize your site performance and reduce your website load (apologies if this seems somewhat spammy and WordPress focused, but with others focused on SEO/marketing, this seemed the least worst) could help matters significantly.

[AstralWanderer]

Quick update - forum performance is back to normal - so whatever the problem was, seems to have been fixed. Thanks.