8mo ago

Server Maintenance - Feb 14 21 at 22:00 UTC

status.ani.social

Server maintenance | ani.social

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.

14 comments

Thank you for your efforts in running ani.social!
- Thank you for being a good member of the Fediverse! o7
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.
- 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.
- That's actually really cool. Maybe I should put something up like this too. I've been curious about our stats lately
Update after trying to use the site for a bit:
It seems like something got messed up. My mobile apps can't connect to ani.social any longer and the alternative frontends are throwing 500 errors. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I am getting prompted occasionally by cloudflare to verify that I am a human.
I am guessing that some cloudflare setting is causing it to block certain consumers of the api. Federation still seems to be working, so ActivityPub is alive and well. Similarly, I was able to connect via @rikka@ani.social, so she should still be ok. However, I am getting 403's most other ways to connect to the site.
- My bad. I think I messed up somewhere but I'll turn off the filter I made in the meantime. I'll figure it out again when I get home from class.

14 comments