Site running slow and giving busy timeouts

[F0LLETT]

Hopefully this is solved.
The server has been the target of a constant DDOS attack. Specifically targetting our SQL DB.
I have taken steps to resolve this, so lets see how it goes.

[Castellen]

Thanks for the ongoing efforts Chris, but it's unfortunately pretty much un-usable at the moment.  Constant timeouts and re-tries, took half an hour to write a 5-minute post.

[F0LLETT]

Thanks for the ongoing efforts Chris, but it's unfortunately pretty much un-usable at the moment.  Constant timeouts and re-tries, took half an hour to write a 5-minute post.

Seems they have changed tactics. Will work on stopping this, once I have access.
Don't have access from my current location.

[F0LLETT]

The slow server issue, should hopefully be solved with changes I have made to server.

[F0LLETT]

Sorry for double post, it should be blindly fast now, .

Basically, fail2ban was not working correctly. I fixed that, then started digging deeper.
Turns out, ChatGPT was aggressively scraping site. Hitting site 800 times a second.
I have now added code to stop this. As a result of ChatGPT doing its thing, it caused log to grow to 163GB (which filled server).

I have now sorted all these issues.

[F0LLETT]

Done some more work on this. So hopefully, we will not have any more slow downs.
The only load left is the who's online section. Due to so many bots, its filling whos online table constantly.

[Boing-ball]

Thanks for the efforts Chris 👍🏻

[F0LLETT]

Seems, we are being attacked now in the evening (UK time).

[Karlos]

Not sure if it's the same issue but I get a lot of connection refused pages recently. The site works perfectly for a few requests and then acts as if I have a firewall level IP ban.

[Retro_Brian_FL]

Same here, that "puppy" is slow or times out.