Site is very slow recently

[Gambit37]

I've noticed the site is very slow recently, taking tens of seconds to render pages. Any ideas what's going on and how we might improve it?

[ChristopheF]

I noticed, no idea yet as I did not have time to investigate.
I assumed an issue at the host provider and was hoping that it would fix itself. I'll see what I can do.

[ChristopheF]

It seems we have a lot of "success" recently...
Tens of guests are connecting each second continuously, which fills up the sessions table in the database and slows down all forum pages.
You can see the number of simultaneous users including guests at the bottom of the forum home page.
I purged that table which fixed the issue, but that continues so the site will slow down again I fear.

[Prince of Elves]

I also noticed that I keep getting auto-logged out these days. Definitely a minor issue compared to the lags and it tends to concide with those but I thought I'd mention it.

[ChristopheF]

I hacked phpbb code yesterday to prevent anonymous users (guests) from creating sessions. As a side effect the number of guests visible at the bottom of the home page stays at 0.
The forum is still bombarded with requests, but now the performance remains acceptable.
We'll see how it goes in the next days...

[Ameena]

I was gonna post something about this yesterday but I forgot - yeah the site has been very slow these last few days, take ages to load pages. And on a couple of occasions it had logged me out so I had to log back in. I did notice that the "Most number of users online at once" stat thingy at the bottom of the homepage was some stupid number like 1450 on that day or the previous one. So yeah, that seems to be what's doing it. Stupid hacky-bot things all logging in at once or something.

[Gambit37]

Oh wow, nice thank you Christophe! I've not got easy access to the forum code these days so it's a bit harder for me to work out what's going on. I wouldn't be surprised if this is AI scraper bots sucking up all our data to one day throw it back at us in some awful tool that we apparently won't be able to live without...