Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2019 7:28 pm Post subject:
There are many and many reasons why I won't follow your suggestion, Deformat.
I won't get into details here about all of them, but our problem here is not the Chinese users. It's rather someone or an organization that seems to use infrastructure from China in a completely abusive way to spam undesired advertisement here. However, their abusive means reached a level where it overloads this place, preventing the supposing customers of these undesired advertisements from reading them. Which is kinda bizarre. But it is still very toxic to PPM and it must be stopped at all costs.
Anyway, your suggestion, if applied, wouldn't stop this abusive organization, since they've started to use cloud services from other countries near China to do this kind of service. QUICK_EDIT
There are many and many reasons why I won't follow your suggestion, Deformat.
I won't get into details here about all of them, but our problem here is not the Chinese users. It's rather someone or an organization that seems to use infrastructure from China in a completely abusive way to spam undesired advertisement here. However, their abusive means reached a level where it overloads this place, preventing the supposing customers of these undesired advertisements from reading them. Which is kinda bizarre. But it is still very toxic to PPM and it must be stopped at all costs.
Anyway, your suggestion, if applied, wouldn't stop this abusive organization, since they've started to use cloud services from other countries near China to do this kind of service.
MasterHaosis wrote:
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
In moment when I just uploaded SHP
Can't we just use 5th Generation technologies to prevent all this? _________________ If you are a MetalHead (Heavy Metal Fan) and don't want to be a metalhead, Just remove your metal ball from your head. �:p .
QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2019 2:29 am Post subject:
It has nothing to do with 5g, 4g (LTE), 3g or whatever. The service temporarily unavailable happens because you get a time out (response is of the server is too slow). On MasterHaosis's case, all the sites in the server were slow or not responding at all. I don't know what caused it. However, in the chinese bot net case, the problem is that PPM was trying to bypass the limit of MySQL queries allowed by the server and, for this reason, it was not getting a response. Once I've blocked the bot net, we've been far below our MySQL queries limit, which normalized the situation. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 5:08 am Post subject:
Update: After many observations about the behavior of this forum, comparison with other forums (like Revora), and some thoughts on what could be making this place get much more SQL queries than all other forums on the server, I had an idea that could make the situation much better and seriously reduce the MySQL queries. And I've implemented that idea. It won't cause any damage to anyone's experience and the speedup was already noticed after some minutes testing.
How's the forum running now for you (after this post was done, please, so pay attention to its data and time)? QUICK_EDIT
503s or server irresponsiveness and/or slowmess has been popping up more, recently. Nothing a quick refresh won't fix tho, unless it's just slow. _________________ One and only developer of the Command & Conquer Dune "C&C D" mod.
m7 wrote:
I tend to release things I create so that assets are never lost to hard drive problems, accidental deletion, or me having to pretend to care about rippers taking things from my project when it is done.
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 3:41 pm Post subject:
Yea, the fact that I've added these friendly URLs made several bots to be more agresssive to crawl them, which is why the forums are being overloaded more often and also what inspired me to think about other ways to improve performance here. I think it is a temporary side effect of the friendly URLs feature. At some point, things should get calmer again. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2020 8:18 pm Post subject:
Update: Today I've just figured out... why do bots need to know forum statistics? Cutting down forum stats for them seems to speed up the forum considerably. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2020 2:13 am Post subject:
Blank page was a stupid mistake in the code that I've done and due to lack of testing (lack of attention, mostly), this one lasted long. But blank pages are really my fault. Regarding the slow site, more than 90% of the traffic of the site are bots. However, there are ones in China that are more aggressive and may severely slow down the site starting from 6:40 am GMT. I don't know when it ends because I'm sleeping after that. Sometimes between 19:00 and 21:00 GMT, it also lags a bit. But I haven't figured out the reason yet. QUICK_EDIT
What do you think that is solution for those bots? And why do they chose this site that much as target? _________________ PPM Halloween Season 2021 QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2020 6:35 am Post subject:
They crawl every site. The thing is that PPM has over 500 thousand topics and millions of links derived from it. So, they have clouds with thousands or million computers and PPM has only one old computer to serve them all... and serve other sites as well, including more popular ones like Revora. Some companies like Google do respect the fact that certain sites can't serve all those bots at once and it tries to respect robots.txt. Other services like Semrush, Mj12Bot, magpie crawler, those non-identified chinese services, and some others have no respect at all for our limited abilities to serve their clouds.
So, our solution is separated in few steps:
1) Friendly urls (that actually makes the problem worse, since it increases the number of indexable pages).
2) Creating a sitemap with desirable indexable links.
3) Prevent bots from indexing bad links: Block sections that won't be interesting to index from bots with robots.txt, with rel=nofollow, meta robots noindex, internal control on those php files to prevent these bots from accessing these places and cuting unnecessary features from bots.
4) Forcing redirect of repetitive links that we don't want to be indexed to those who we want to be indexed, so it deletes those links and indexes only the ones from the sitemap.
Step 1 deteriorates performance. The steps 3 and 4 should improved it a lot and reduce the intensity of bot invasion. It should also improve PPM's performance on search engines.
At the moment, step 1 has been done, although I am planning to eventually add topic/forum pages as an additional command.
Step 2 is finished, although it will be incremented as topic/forum pages gets implemented.
Step 3 is nearly finished or at least it has a considerable progress.
Step 4 wasn't done yet. Last edited by Banshee on Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:04 am; edited 1 time in total QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2020 7:41 am Post subject:
Update: It seems I am pretty much done with all 4 steps mentioned on the post above for both the site and forums. PPM runs faster in the weekends, because the chinese botnet doesn't seem to work on weekends. Only on weekdays, don't ask me why.
There might be few tweaks that I'll still do to improve how search engines index forum pages and one minor tweak to improve filtering of certain botnets. But we are really close to the finished state of this project and hopefully the performance from PPM should be better now (although the real tests only happens during the weekdays... specially at 6:40 am GMT). QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2020 3:05 am Post subject:
It is faster indeed, but we can't celebrate it yet. It seems that the evil chinese botnet of doom only works on weekdays. So, I'll only celebrate if it continues to be stable as soon as it handles its invasion properly. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2020 6:18 pm Post subject:
That's a good bug report, LKO. I did edit the way traditional forums read its topics but I forgot to tweak the ones with hashtags. But, don't worry. This bug is fixed now. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 12:54 am Post subject:
I've tested with TS Manual, and it worked fine (using PPM's left menu -> Tiberian Sun). Do you have any specific link that is no longer working? Please, cite samples, so I can work specifically on them or figure out what's going on. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:34 am Post subject:
As far as I've tried, logged in with my account, it works fine here.
However, using a private window (logged out), I've managed to reproduce what happened to you.
Anyway, I've made some tweaks and on my latest attempts, I could download these files using captcha. Check it out now and tell me the results, please. QUICK_EDIT
PPM got me logged out while going through the posts, it could be related to the Service temporarily unavailable situation couple of days ago. Top of the page showed Log in and bottom of the page still showed my ID loggedin in Registered Users, as if browser session got lost. Happened only once.
For last couple of days, it also doesn't show Ads when browsing as guest.
Previously new posts mark used to get updated immediately if I visited that thread, now it doesn't, may be it takes a logout to get updated.
Could be problem with cookies.
There is no related change on my end, browser/cookies/whitelisting etc. QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Mon May 04, 2020 6:14 pm Post subject:
The ads thing is a problem with the async google ads code. I still couldn't figure out what's wrong with it and Google Adsense documentation doesn't help much with it. QUICK_EDIT
Yeah, I also notice that it is a bit slower. While I writing this, it is still loading.
Anyway, yesterday I got ,,timed out". Site was offline for about half hour (when I tried to come here later about half hour later I still got time out), and did not check later again. _________________ PPM Halloween Season 2021 QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri May 08, 2020 7:01 am Post subject:
The site got offline for a couple of hours yesterday because someone reported some sort of abuse somewhere in the server that was proven to be a false alarm. However, the data center seems to have the policy to cut the server first and ask questions later. QUICK_EDIT
,,to cut the server first and ask questions later" ???
And disable site for hours for nothing? That is not normal. _________________ PPM Halloween Season 2021 QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Fri May 08, 2020 3:41 pm Post subject:
MasterHaosis wrote:
,,to cut the server first and ask questions later" ???
And disable site for hours for nothing? That is not normal.
Considering the stories I've seen/partaken as an enterprise system admin... I'd say it's reasonable. PPM's obviously not hosted on business class and I don't think Revora has the contractual rights to say that their server can't be turned off even when it's hacked to mine cryptocurrency, for example. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
=======================
Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
5 days ago and yesterday i had the exact same 503 error too, why does it happen in middle of the day like 05 PM-08 PM? (in my own timeline of course) _________________ If you are a MetalHead (Heavy Metal Fan) and don't want to be a metalhead, Just remove your metal ball from your head. �:p .
QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2020 11:14 pm Post subject:
Error 503s happens when PPM forums is either using too much SQL queries or too much bandwidth at once. I believe today's event was a mix of both. There is a special_archiver/3.1.1 bot from http://www.archive.org (207.241.229.222) that seems to be acting too much aggressively. However, its services are appreciated, since I've already rescued content from several tutorials that had pictures hosted elsewhere and its host went down at some point. So, for now, I'm being patient. At this moment, this bot is still very active and I'm being able to load the site just fine. QUICK_EDIT
Constantly had 503s for the last half hour.
Now no sign of any slowdown or other bad effect.
Another bot attack on the server again? _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
I've opened and read these threads several times already and yet they're still marked as unread.
That one thread I posted a reply also hasn't been cleared.
help.
EDIT: now this post is in new posts too... plz make it stop...
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_________________ One and only developer of the Command & Conquer Dune "C&C D" mod.
m7 wrote:
I tend to release things I create so that assets are never lost to hard drive problems, accidental deletion, or me having to pretend to care about rippers taking things from my project when it is done.
I've opened and read these threads several times already and yet they're still marked as unread.
That one thread I posted a reply also hasn't been cleared.
help.
EDIT: now this post is in new posts too... plz make it stop...
It never happened months ago or years ago, but that's what I notice every time I check for new posts, this makes me want to click on "Mark all forums read". _________________ If you are a MetalHead (Heavy Metal Fan) and don't want to be a metalhead, Just remove your metal ball from your head. �:p .
QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:52 am Post subject:
Yup, it seems that the cPanel SSL certificate we use here uses TLS 1.3, which is no longer compatible with older Google Chrome browsers (62 and older versions).
The best I can do is to force the users of these browsers to visit the non-SSL version of the site, but I don't plan to work on it in the next days, since I have a lot of things with higher priorities to do related to my real life. QUICK_EDIT
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