Support issues

I'm getting frustrated with support from KH over the last few weeks. I have more frequent slow downs. Support will tell me it's mysql so it gets restarted. Then they tell me its bots. Then its not bots. Today it is apparently bots. What I know is that a month or two back, no issues. Lately, it's been woeful.

My ticket today - 2 hours before a response.
 
The load average did skyrocket to over 100 a few hours ago. Something is definitely up. I'll see what I can find.

Without catching things like this at the moment they're happening it's pretty difficult to figure out what was happening based on the logs available.
 
Thanks... I would appreciate a definitive cause and fix as the differing reasons offered then retracted then offered again are not really confidence building - and I have my own forum members probably suffering confidence in my site and wondering what is going on.
 
Based on the logs attached in this ticket from when you opened it, if you look at apache stats and "ps" it does appear to be an attack or a mass flood of legit traffic all at once. Perhaps an overzelous *cough* bing *cough* search robot. There were Apache connections galore.

Still digging.
 
Thanks, if I don't reply in a timely fashion, forgive me, as I have to take the kids out to a science type open day thing.
 
OK, so as I said, support one day will say it's bots and then another support person will say it's not.

The snippet I was given in an email showed legitimate member traffic as images do load when viewing topics.

In any case, I did what was recommended in regard to the supposed bot issue and added a bot exclusion list to .httaccess (i note that the support email claimed over 400 bots had visited yet it did not say over what period - could have been over a 12 month period at one a day, and also did not say which ones. I assume some tool was used to list them). The list I added to .htaccess is fairly large and inclusive.

Little traffic on the site at this time of day and it took 30 seconds to load. I doubt it's bots.
 
I relate with this guy

The issues are quite different. His were more or less with his application itself and it's requirements - he changed forum software and blamed the server for application-side things. There was also a node harware issue in their if I recall correctly.

Yours is definitely bot, likely malicious traffic though it could still be search engine spiders going wild. Baidu and Bing are bad about this and actually I saw Google doing this to someone the other day which is unusual as usually they're pretty good about not totally decimating a site all at once.

I've gone ahead and pulled your ticket up into the escalated queue where I can continue to monitor things and come up with a consensus onto a common cause and making sure it's not different things each time. I'm trying to catch a pattern so we can get to the bottom of this once and for all.
 
Top