Too Many Requests message

[mulrich]

Did he abscond to Bermuda with the millions he made from this site?

Has anyone checked obituaries from his home town?

[bdawg923]

Did he abscond to Bermuda with the millions he made from this site?

Has anyone checked obituaries from his home town?

viewtopic.php?t=21166&start=390

[GandalfPC]

I got this screen yesterday, had too many issues trying to upload the image to post it at the time

[acetofive]

-

[Honeybee]

G, we could use that as the tuck of a new UC deck

(and the icon pattern could be the card back)

[Strag]

really bad today, took me 10 times to send this message, also site was completely unreachable for a time.

[GandalfPC]

Site came up for me for a few pulls as a blank white page just now, the big empty.

[Honeybee]

It has become a real MESS !
I have even had a couple of different error messages thrown in to add a bit of variety

[zlexander]

Damn 90% time its showing too many req...

[drboone]

Dunno why I hadn't before, but just noticed this in the page footer:

> Most users ever online was 26411 on Tue May 27, 2025 10:27 am

This makes me believe that the problem is either a denial-of-service attack, or a distributed crawl for e.g. search engines (less likely) or AI engines (more likely). I've been seeing the latter at work.

[GandalfPC]

pulling the main page every few seconds I can see the guest user count climbing slowly, at the moment it is just over 200

it is something. not a good something.

[Honeybee]

Well spotted Dr
I just noticed the harness racing forum I moderate had a record of 31,325 four days ago
It is not unusual for it to have over 6,000 like right now (with only 3 being members)
But it never creates any error problems although I don't think I was on it at the time of the record

[GandalfPC]

As fast as I can reload the page I see 7 guests adding, nearly 2000 at the moment.

Pretty sure that ain’t normal

[GandalfPC]

12,755 now with 40 more every second…

[drboone]

Hostgator applies some limits -- number of running processes is easy to find doco for. I think I saw an indication that they may in some cases apply a simultaneous web request limit, but I can't find that right now. Either, plus some sort of distributed abuse, equals this problem.

[drboone]

Oh, and I see there are about four months until other forms of disaster:

Domain Name: unitedcardists.com
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2025-09-24T12:34:54Z

[GandalfPC]

Peeking about trying to find any thread with a views counter ticking to even hint at these being real users - and I see no such activity. Perhaps pulling index pages, perhaps attempting to brute force passwords (as the errors often appear to be “user” too many requests)

If you do see anything running a fast view count, drop me a PM.

[kevork]

I sent a carrier pigeon to rousselle. Maybe he can clack some keys, enter the mainframe, and see what's going on under the hood.

[acetofive]

"Peeking about trying to find any thread with a views counter ticking to even hint at these being real users"

That's what caught my attention - views not keeping up with visitors, nor new members (20000 guests but only one new member a week? Impossible!), nor visitors distributed across the forum.

[rousselle]

Carrier pigeon arrived; thanks, Kevork!

I managed to get into the admin control panel and reset a switch, but there's still work to be done under the hood. Looking now, and I've sent up a flare of my own to see what other resources can be brought to bear.

Sorry for the inconvenience, folks!

More news as it develops....

[Honeybee]

Here is the forum figures of the site I moderate (on my own)

You will see it is very similar
15,340 online right now but only 4 members
UC has 18,350 and only 5 members

Don't you love that Spammers Denied Registration figure of 848 THOUSAND !!!!!!

[bdawg923]

@rousselle May want to look into setting up cloudflare for ddos mitigation. They put one of those anti-robot buttons. It's annoying for humans but at least it could help lower the 429 errors. Also drboone is probably right. There's like 20-30 (?) active users in the forum but there's 17000 unique visitors. To me it does seem like a bunch of shitty AI scraper bots.

[Honeybee]

We need a QUICK FIX gang - the forum is fast approaching UNUSABLE to read or post

[Strag]

I've created a Discord server in case we want to be able to talk if the site goes down, if only to plan for a new site. Join link here: https://discord.gg/MwwUx94Ag2

[montenzi]

I mentioned before that I had full owner-level access to this board (except for billing and the domain) when I was helping Mike fix some issues. That access was never removed, but for a while, I thought I had lost the SSH keys to the server. It took some time to recover them when Allan asked me to help last year — but I do have access to hosting again. Essentially, it’s full owner-level access, as I also have "owner" permissions in the board’s control panel.

Now, some of you might say, “I don’t trust this guy.” And that’s totally fine. This board has been running in this state for many many years. Since Alex disappeared, we’ve been backing up the forum daily (I pay for backups), and it can be fully restored within hours on another domain if needed. So please don’t worry.

I just need to put together a plan for what to do in case I “disappear” too

Regarding the issue — I can’t fix it, as I strongly believe there’s something wrong on the host’s side. Let’s wait and see.

[montenzi]

Some technical details:

I did a quick test — temporarily shut down the forum for 5 minutes via the control panel. As expected, only the top part with the forum name and a maintenance message was showing. But I still kept getting error messages.

There could be a few reasons for this. First, it looks like the error isn’t coming from the forum itself, but from something on the server — possibly something set up by the hosting company. It could be some kind of protection against too many requests, or a rate limit on the web server (like nginx). Either way, this seems to be something on their end, and you likely can’t control or change it.

What worries me most is that I wasn’t able to access the server via SSH. I’ve seen this happen on this server a long time ago with the exact same SSH error. It eventually resolved on its own, but I suspect the hosting provider made some changes on their end. This current issue may not be directly related, but I believe it’s further proof that there’s a problem with the hosting company’s configuration.

I finally managed to get in, but there were still random errors. I checked something by running the ulimit -a command to see the system limits — and I believe the 100 open files limit is WAY too low. That’s definitely a configuration issue, since the recommended setting is something like 60,000, and you start getting some errors when this limit is set to 1000. Maybe some other settings are not optimal as well. The server itself is not overloaded with average load is almost zero.

As for the traffic spikes — one possible (but not confirmed) reason is that search engine bots are aggressively crawling the forum. In phpBB, the sid parameter added to the end of URLs makes bots think each version of the same page is different, so they can end up loading the same page thousands of times. That might not overload the forum directly (since it still works), but it could be triggering something on the host’s side, which leads to the error. Most likely, incorrect limits set by a hosting company. It's not a forum software issue!

Just my thoughts.

-jailshell-4.2$ ulimit -a

core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) 800000
scheduling priority (-e) 0
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) 235743
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size (kbytes, -m) 800000
open files (-n) 100
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority (-r) 0
stack size (kbytes, -s) 15240
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 25
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks (-x) unlimited

[bdawg923]

You think it's an issue on the host side. But why is it happening so bad all of a sudden. Are you saying they made a config change in the last 3 days? Also why not email them and ask what the site is getting constant 429 errors instead of just guessing what the issue might be.

[montenzi]

You think it's an issue on the host side. But why is it happening so bad all of a sudden. Are you saying they made a config change in the last 3 days? Also why not email them and ask what the site is getting constant 429 errors instead of just guessing what the issue might be.

I'm not saying they recently changed something — I have no idea. I haven’t opened the forum in a while, haven’t seen these errors, and I just don’t have the free time right now to actively deal with it (like contacting them, etc.).

What I would do is move this forum to another domain and a different hosting, since without access to the hosting support, it will be difficult to deal with issues like this.

Alex, this discussion is public — if you have any thoughts, please contact me privately.

[kevork]

The number of guests has significantly dwindled (105 at the time of this post).

It's upsetting that the statistic for the highest user count is now flawed. The previous authentic statistic was:

Most users ever online was 3868 on Sun Dec 01, 2019 8:20 pm

[Honeybee]

Alex, this discussion is public — if you have any thoughts, please contact me privately.

Mont did you write this as a tease?

ps Somebody has definitely done something to eliminate all the bot guests