Forum saturated?

[MysteryX]

What's the deal with this forum being constantly saturated? "server is busy try again later"

Also seeing post view count being abnormally high. What's going on. Mostly AIs scanning around? And forum not filtering bots from view count?

[FranceBB]

We started talking about this here https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=186980 but in a nutshell we peaked at 7.4 millions hits per day.

https://i.ibb.co/3Y0nRGbS/image.png

The traffic has since come down and the forum is breathing again.
Anyway, the storm has passed.

[Columbo]

No, I just received the message 2 minutes ago. It's sporadic.

[MysteryX]

I get the errors a *lot*, almost unusable.

The forum is *that* popular, it's all real traffic?

[Swede]

Well, it's of course not real traffic. There are a %¤#%-load of AI- and regular bots out there draining the forum and I'm doing whatever I can to reduce the load.
Hopefully it will calm down.

[MysteryX]

Ya it says 800+ people active in AviSynth forum, but the actual activity is very low. Definitely bots.

That's a *lot* of bots though...

and it makes view statistics completely useless

[Columbo]

Just a thought. Perhaps you need to re-consider and use CloudFlare. Other popular forums (like mine!) use it successfully and we don't get these issues with them.

[MysteryX]

I was about to say exactly the same: CloudFlare has a lot of features for things like that. There's spam-protection, caching, CDN and other features.

Just delivering static assets on CloudFlare's CDN network would already reduce server load.