I had the better part of 5 hours this morning (8am to 1pm England time) when I could either not get in at all or eventually got Rick leaning on big dip sign (error 500 ) saying he'd been playing with the servers. It was very slow on the brief occasions I did get in.
All seems well now.
Anybody else?
I think there was a bot attack last night. May have taken some doing to clear up .
Yep, and it's still lagging for me. Let us all spare a good thought for Andrew and his team as they play whack-a-mole.
Oh yes, CL!! Still lagging with loading so I'm sure Andrew et al are busy!
Webmaster made a post the last time there was significant performance issues outlining some of the problems. Ill-informed guessing about bots isn't helpful.
Still very laggy
GerryM, I saw it happen last night. But if that means I'm ill-informed, my bad.
Still a bit slower than usual at times; probably gummed up with all the jelly beans. :-)
@CJean You aren't ill-informed. You are correct
Just for the sake of clarity since Chris decided they'd weigh in on it too.
Sorry CJean. It was a somewhat rude way of putting it. My apologies for that
I think there was a bot attack last night. May have taken some doing to clear up
I'm not sure what led you to believe there was some sort of "bot attack". When you say you saw it, I don't know what you could have seen. A spam thread or post isn't a "bot attack". These posts have no impact on the performance of the site. Without talking about the security of the site in a publicly accessible thread, it's well protected from what you may be terming a bot attack, usually known as a "distributed denial of service attack" or "DDoS". The user can't "see" this kind of attack. The occasional spam thread or post has no connection to this.
The performance issues appear to be ongoing symptoms of what Webmaster posted about in this thread I'll link to below. Mark has what I'd consider to be a much more educated guess at what's going on below Webmaster's post. Still just a guess though.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/ongoing-server-issues
Sure, DDoS attacks can cause the frontend (the pages we see) and the backend (the database that the frontend queries) to have difficulties in communicating with each other. In this case I'm almost certain that's not the problem because of what I know about the technical aspects of the site. It's not really wise for Webmaster to go into a lot of detail publicly, as too much detail could compromise the overall security.
I hope that clears it up. I'm sorry about how I phrased it, but I'd consider talk of bots and bot attacks to be needless scaremongering, when the actual issues are far more benign.
It's always so good to have an expert among our ranks. Perhaps GerryM can educate me on the correct terminology for the following scenario- the appearance of multiple garbage posts on diffrent threads, each by first time posters with usernames consisting of apparently random numbers, and all occurring within seconds. Apparently this cannot be a bot attack, even though that is what Google AI calls it.
Send me a PM if you want to discuss it further. That way you can address me personally rather than in the third person.
