[photon]

Oh hey it loaded for me this morning! Though it still takes a lot longer than normal.

So that makes me suspect what the issue is.

I think it's due to the weird bot activity on the Ukraine thread. There was a couple of bots in Hong Kong that would scrape that thread constantly generating multiple requests per second. No idea why. Very weird. To be honest I was a bit scared of doing anything overt about it and drawing the ire of nation state actors or something lol.

Anyway when I started digging into what exactly the database was doing all the time there was a lot of activity in the guest table where the forum keeps track of guests (which makes sense as the bots showed up as guests and not official bots).

On the front page there's that part that says "Total guests that have visited the forum in the last 24 hours: 307,310", which I think runs a query on the guest table which kept getting longer and longer until finally the query started to break.

I "broke" the feature they were using to scrape (print thread URL) and the # of requests from those IPs have gone way down, though it still seems to be coming once per second or so. I could ban the IPs as well though that'd be more obvious.

So I think as the guest table naturally gets cleaned up speed on that page will improve. If I get a chance I will see if I can find an obvious query to dump some records from the table without breaking things.

So weird.