Forum running slow!

[ictbydesign]

Anyone else noticed performance is very slow today.

[Blyth]

For me it's actually been happening on and off since August.

[Woodstock]

Currently, the forum is "lightly loaded":

Users browsing this forum: Woodstock and 186 guests

Major slowdowns have that number in the thousands for guests. The major indexing bots, like Google and Microsoft, are known, and limit themselves on their scans. Others...

When there are a lot of "users" hitting the forum, it will be slow. Most bots seem to continuously request pages.

Edited to add: I took a look at the whole forum's load, and found:

In total there are 2449 users online :: 7 registered, 2 hidden and 2440 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

As I said, some times, we get hit with a lot of bots...

[Reiver]

Sadly all websites need protection these days from the unrelentingly scummy AI harvesters and it's only getting worse.

Any thoughts on using Anubis or similar to protect the forum? (The main MakeMKV site appears static and less likely to suffer - except the FAQ which is borked at the moment.) Various open source projects have used Anubis successfully to counter and it's revealing how much their server load drops.

[Woodstock]

That would require convincing the site owner to make changes. There are limits to what we can do, unfortunately.