All: An excessive amount of incoming HTTP requests are significantly slowing down the server today, as you may well have noticed. I’m actively monitoring the situation, although the nature of botnet spammers is that they’re programmed so as to distribute the load and foil any IP-based blocking schemes.
Update, 1810 GMT: Until further notice, the Rumor Forum and the DMF Forum are offline. This will allow things to resolve on the server. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Update, 1930 GMT: Hang it all! I’m finally just giving up and rebooting the server, which will stop the backup process. We’ll just have to risk the data security.
Update, 1946 GMT: Server’s back online, so I’m bringing the forum back up.
Damn…that’s got to be BAD if the .net is offline for the foreseeable future.
The forums are the biggest causes of load on the server; if we take those out, everything else has a prayer of staying going. Then I can reboot the server once the backups are done [we're at 63days+ of uptime, and that's typically where this box starts to have I/O issues], and then hopefully it’ll chill out a little. The biggest issue is the unresolved backups.
Why? Was the backup process malfunctioning somehow?
The backup process is intensive, and when the spamnets hit at the same time as the backup, imagine rushhour in any city with several key routes blocked or down to one lane.
No, but it was hanging out there, waiting to be done. The backup process uses a *lot* of computing power, so it watches the server levels to see if, “Hey, maybe I need to shut down.” Because the server never would ease up, it wouldn’t ever finish.
Things seem to be okay with the box now, so I’m going to bring the forums back online…