Poor connection to RAF Commands

[ian94avenge]

Hi all,

Is anyone else experiencing poor / slow connection to the site ?

This occurring with home and works PC

Regards,

Ian

[JimCorbett1977]

Me too Ian, I had real problems over the weekend with very slow load times.

Jim

[CZ_RAF]

Yes chaps I can confirm the same in Prague - very slow responses.

Pavel

[HughAHalliday]

Connections seem to be erratic - today I tried to log on, failed (connection problem), did some browsing elsewhere, came back to this site 30 minutes and got in easily. In these circumstances, one wonders - "Is it my computer ? my server ? the website ?" I wonder if this may be related to more general problems of massed cyber attacks that target banking systems or defence establishments but which probably do collateral damage to less earth-shaking sites such as this.

[Ross_McNeill]

We are are having another bout of visits from an aggressive search bot from China.

Instead of the regular one or two bots that follow thread links this particular pest creates new bots and quickly fills up the available external user connections.

It is from a data miner that ignores the usual meta commands to exclude robots from certain pages of the site.

I've seen 3 registered users , 12 true guest users and 96 bots from the same IP on the site at the same time yesterday morning.

Nothing much that can be done about it apart from taking the whole site off line until it decides that the RAFCommands IP address is dead.

A snapshot of the current (quiet) moment
There are currently 43 users online. 8 members and 35 guests

22 of these "guests" are versions of the same bot.

Regards
Ross

[CZ_RAF]

Thanks for explanation Ross, so I think the only thing we can do is to be extremely patient.

Pavel

[Ross_McNeill]

In the short time since my last message the online picture now is

There are currently 57 users online. 5 members and 52 guests

Almost all the guest increase is due to the bot.

Normally the server access ports time share for users eg (while you read or compose) without sending a new page request it carries out a request for another user so 50 actual ports can serve more than 1000 human users.

The bots work so fast with page requests that they end up almost at parity eg 1 bot per port. Once 50 bots are spawned and active there is no port left for true user access, hence the internet page unavailable error display.

Same thing basically as a denial of service attack.

Each time a message is posted the bots returns to map the entire site once again rather than just note the changes.

Ross

[dennis_burke]

Suck it up lads (and ladies)

How long is it to drive to Kew from your house/work place? Would take me a couple of hours heehee

[ian94avenge]

Thanks Ross, the sort of Chinese take away I do not enjoy.

Dennis, the origins of my post was not a winge, but just to ask if others were experiencing the same, my thoughts were the same as Hugh "is it my computer" etc, so now I am as happy as Larry can be in the circumstanes.

Just out of interest my connection this time was back to normal.

Ian

[northeagle]

Seems to be just the first visit of the day. The rest are normal.