[Cancelled] Server Maintenance - Feb 14 21 at 22:00 UTC

status.ani.social Server maintenance | ani.social

Welcome to ani.social status page for real-time and historical data on system performance.

It's been a while since I've made these type of posts but there'll be a server maintenance that will (hopefully) address the recent Lemmy-UI problems.

edit: I'm going to cancel this because the problem has been solved by blocking excessive crawling/scraping bots. No more crashing and zombie processes.

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Update: I'll postpone this for a week as it seems like the issue comes from a Chinese datacenter in Singapore that's scraping the site very aggressively.
I'll block the IP range and see if that solves the problem.
- Damn AI scraper bots (probably)! Thanks for the backend work!
  Out of curiosity, are they just hitting the lemmy-ui frontend and not hitting the others?
  
  They only seem to be scraping the lemmy-ui frontend and not the others. I'm actually not 100% sure if it's scraping but this is what it looks like:
  
  All from the same IP range in Singapore. A huge spike in requests (up to almost 5k per minute) matches the time when Lemmy-UI crashed last night.
  I captcha'd the ASN (it's Alibaba btw) for now (I don't know if that's okay to do, hopefully I'm not blocking real people) but perhaps there are better solutions like ratelimiting.
  Anyway, let me know if you're still having trouble accessing the site. The filter should only cover that particular ASN for now.
  
  Whoa. Was there anything else going down in that time frame? I'd be interested to have some profile on the attacker. Do you have any information about where the majority of ani.social's traffic came from before that?
  
  Nothing else went down. After blocking the ASN, I found out that they've been scraping the site from Hong Kong too but not as aggressively with Singapore. Or rather, the Hong Kong servers are more consistent but not as ~~frequent~~ bursty (I don't know how best to describe it lol). The only info I have is the ASN which points to the Alibaba Group. It also doesn't disclose what it is other than "Microsoft Edge Windows" which is not very nice in my opinion.
  Cloudflare only gives me logs for the past 24 hours but most of ani.social's traffic comes from other instances federating in (unsurprisingly, Lemmy.World is #1).
  
  I'd almost be concerned that it's a nation state at that point.
- May I suggest https://www.crowdsec.net/ for those pesky scrappers? I've been using their free service for about 3 years on my personal server and it's very good for dealing with these kind of problems.
  
  Thanks! I've used this before but decided not to set it up for this server because of Fediverse things. I'm afraid I might break federation with it. But I'll see if I can work around that.
  
  Good luck.

15 comments