'Tis the Well-Dressing Season

[Silver Tabby]

Be sure to look after your wells!

"One year in the Presbyterians times during the civil wars, they neglected the annual  dressing of the salt-well in Driotwich - and the spring became dry, to the great loss of the town.  So thereafter they revived their annual custom (notwithstanding the power of the parliament) and ever since, volens nolens the Minister there ( and also the soldiers) they did and will Dress it, and the salt water returned again and still continues."

c1688

(volens nolens = Latin = willing/unwilling)

[klondike]

Sound advice. 

When Scrumpy gets that round tuit perhaps she'll lend it out and we can all attend to any neglected wells we may have,

[Diasi]

Crikey, this post has made me miss my home area which I rarely think about.

https://visitpeakdistrict.com/events/barlow-well-dressing

[Silver Tabby]

That looks lovely, Diasi.  Thank you.

[JBR]

Be sure to look after your wells!

"One year in the Presbyterians times during the civil wars, they neglected the annual  dressing of the salt-well in Driotwich - and the spring became dry, to the great loss of the town.  So thereafter they revived their annual custom (notwithstanding the power of the parliament) and ever since, volens nolens the Minister there ( and also the soldiers) they did and will Dress it, and the salt water returned again and still continues."

c1688

(volens nolens = Latin = willing/unwilling)

A bit like my old school motto: Possumus Volumus = we can and we will
(er, not a posh school, just a local grammar school)!

This site's being rather slow to load today.  Anyone else?

[klondike]

This site's being rather slow to load today.  Anyone else?

I checked the stats. It started a couple of days back. I've changed nothing recently apart from the database backup method but that gets done overnight. Higher "guest" traffic (spammers and hackers) but nothing obviously wrong. I have taken the time honoured first step in fixing anything computer related and rebooted the server.

Checked the access log. Looks like the culprit is the Amazon bot
https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot
It says "Amazonbot respects standard robots.txt rules." so I have told it to naff off in the robots.txt file. Will see if that stops it - it depends when it next checks.

It's ludicrous. I grabbed 12 seconds worth of the log and just about every request is the damned Amazonbot. It is giving the forum quite a hanmering and the server power is pretty low so I'm more surprised it is still working than I am it has slowed. Each line is a request (page read) 2 of the 32 shown in the maybe 12 seconds were not the Amazonbot

52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:14 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82615 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:14 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3752.msg82615 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5592
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:15 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82547 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:15 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82561 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:15 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3752.msg82547 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5592
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:15 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82561 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5592
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:16 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82559 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:17 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82559 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5592
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:17 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82481 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:18 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82481 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5592
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:18 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82486 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:19 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82486 HTTP/1.1" 200                              5591
?? NotAmazon 216.144.248.19 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:19 +0000] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 5624
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:19 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82448 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:19 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82448 HTTP/1.1" 200 5591
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:20 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82633 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:21 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82633 HTTP/1.1" 200 5594
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:21 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82618 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:22 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82618 HTTP/1.1" 200 5592
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:22 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82617 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
?? NotAmazon 185.191.171.11 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:22 +0000] "GET /index.php?topic=2955.0 HTTP/1.1" 200 7156
3.224.220.101 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:23 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82617 HTTP/1.1" 200 5593
3.147.67.48 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:24 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=sucguj96o77gq3sfpv0v3emkiu&msg=103328 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
3.147.67.48 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:24 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=sucguj96o77gq3sfpv0v3emkiu;topic=4495.msg103328 HTTP/1.1" 200 7195
23.22.35.162 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:24 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82449 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
23.22.35.162 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:25 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82449 HTTP/1.1" 200 5592
44.214.187.82 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:25 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=p3r6ekkams03qanon7t70728at&topic=762.0 HTTP/1.1" 200 5808
23.22.35.162 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:25 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82545 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
23.22.35.162 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:26 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82545 HTTP/1.1" 200 5592
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:26 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&msg=82612 HTTP/1.1" 302 20
52.70.240.171 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:27 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c;topic%3D3748.msg82612 HTTP/1.1" 200 5592
23.22.35.162 - - [20/May/2024:08:56:27 +0000] "GET /index.php?PHPSESSID=l7kmkm488l7srpa24umbhtoh9c&topic=3756.0 HTTP/1.1" 200 7310

***

Looked again and it is going even faster. Running about 12 requests a second. We'd need rather a lot of members to manage that so no need to upgrade the server for a few weeks.,
       

[Scrumpy]

This site's being rather slow to load today.  Anyone else?

yes.. very much so... The last few days I have had problems logging in..
 

[JBR]

Thanks Klon, for looking into this.
I use Amazon a lot when purchasing and it occurs to me that I may have inadvertently allowed their bugs access, though of course I'd never knowingly do that.
Is there anything you would suggest that I should do to prevent this happening again, should it actually be down to me in some way?

[klondike]

It's nothing to do with anybody here. Amazon use it to find pages with answers to potential Alexa questions. No wonder its answers are so bloody poor it it looks for them here.

At first I thought it might be getting its revenge on me for telling it what I thought about its performance when I asked for news on a subject and it read a web page from 2023. Then I remembered just how useless it is and there is no way it would link me up to the server it was relentlessly searching.

On the bright side Alexa may soon be telling folks what a problem mass immigration is, how sodding useless EVs are and advising them to vote Reform. Sadly I doubt that though.

[Diasi]

I haven't noticed any slow down or log in issues.

[klondike]

My stats show there were issues but they are intermittent not all the time. Having found the cause if Amazon do honour Robots.txt they will stop crawling the site by tomorrow morning. If they don't I'll just find all their IPs either from the logs or hopefully they will be listed and block the lot in the htaccess file so they will have minimal impact.

[Diasi]

[klondike]

There is a contact us link in the Amazon page about their bot so I sent them this...

When I investigated why my forum running on a small Lightsail instance had gone completely down the pan I found it was your bot overloading the server. I have put an exclusion in robots.txt for it now but rather than annoy my users another day waiting for you to pick that up I have now  excluded you via htaccess. If I remove that htaccess exclusion tomorrow will the bot's first action be to read robots.txt and go away or will I have to put up with it annoying all my users for longer?

Quite why you think Alexa would be interested in the ramblings of a bunch of geriatrics like us is entirely beyond me. Your bot seems to be about as useful as Alexa's replies. Initially I thought I was being targeted for telling the thing that reading a year old web page didn't constiture news.

Regards

Mark

I'm not holding my breath.