Server load problems

[AngelMarc]

My primary PC is an 11 year old SuperMicro board, X9DRH-7F. Dual E5 2667 V2 CPUs. It's... not complete garbage. PC would have cost like $15k new. I have $450 in it. Server boards are neet.

[vlad01]

I have/had some interesting dual CPU workstation boards from the early-mid 00s.

Of course I never use them for that purpose, instead turned them into unique general desktops for stuffing around on and some retro gaming haha. But those days are over, most of that stuff ends up dying with no economical way to repair or replace parts. Retro hardware are for the rich elite nerds now, not for us regular pleb nerds like me

[DavidBraley]

I just pushed some funds your way Antus! I hope it helps!

[antus]

Thanks!

We've seen 56,000 unique visitors since the temp fix went in. So far so good. The planned permanent hardware upgrade fix next week is looking likely to succeed.

[immortality]

Looking nice and stable now!

[antus]

Interesting. The load rapidly went up by a large factor a couple of hours ago, but the unique users did not. This signals a non-typical usage pattern. EG not just people in the shed on their phones googling for information. Then we look at Cloudflare's geo data now that its available. Singapore is greatly over represented for its size and cars. You know what else is in Singapore? Chinese data firm Tencent's APAC data center. I detected them manually as a source of abuse before Cloudflare and was able to block their network with my own firewall. Now that I am behind Cloudflare, Clouldflare is failing to identify the Chinese bots, and the load is back. And its a new chore to figure out how to block it as I can't do it on the IP level as all traffic is from Cloudflare's network. Its just the forum is now big enough to hold out. Sill, not good netizens. Cloudflare should have source data in the headers but its work to configure it and moves the burden from the network in to the web server. Currently we're reaching 80,000 unique users for the 24 hour period, and the server has been working for only half of it. So it's probably current load is about 150,000 users daily assuming the bots are high frequency and don't count as unique like the other data implies. We'll see what we get to by tomorrow.

Here is an interesting read https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs ... countries/ probably start at "A disproportionate burden...." for the time poor.

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[AngelMarc]

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/small-g ... /233569/11

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[gmtech825]

Count me in for a donation. I don't have a ton of extra now but I'm sure every little bit helps

[immortality]

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/small-g ... /233569/11
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We had similar issues over on the JC forum, Darren had to set it up so CLoudfare would challenge and verify all users or the server was getting overloaded.

[antus]

The cloudflare bot protection isnt doing much but I set up some custom rules to challenge users from tencent networks and that is working ok for now. I think its on the right track but will take more monitoring and tuneing. It'll probably be a cat and mouse game for ever hopefully cloudflare can improve and do more of the fight automatically. At the moment its more of a basic firewall with a nice UI but at least its workable.