Site downtime Sept 3 2026

Post by **matthew1** » 03 Sep 2026, 18:21

Sorry if you tried to access MVS in the last 10 hours. I've been working on it during this time and it's like poking a hornets' nest to improve the nest. I do not have a Dev or Test environment (I've tried in the past but ended up spending more time on it than time making MVS better, so that was a poor cost/benefit).

Goal: clean out many different server configurations to gain efficiency. Reconfigure server architecture to take advantage of modern efficiency features that were unheard of just a few years ago.

Why now?: the traffic from junk bots (AI data harvesting, data harvesting, spam, etc.) is so overwhelming these days it slows the server, or knocks it out entirely for minutes at a time. Sometimes 10k http requests per minute. They forced my hand.

Better server: well, yea, I can always buy my way out of this problem by getting a faster/more robust server, but there is 0 reason to do this in my mind. Here's why: the current VPS is a 8GB memory/4 vCPU machine that can easily handle the MVS human traffic. I could bump it up and spend $400/month but knowing I went the easy route on this would keep me up at night. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you agree with this philosophy because you're here trying to keep a Volvo on the road. You could have bought a 2026 XC90, but you didn't. You're here to keep the one you have running.

Anyway, yea it was bad today, and I didn't really practice good messaging to let you know.

If you're interested in what I did/am doing please mention this and I'd be happy to shoot the breeze about it.

Please note I'm still working on it and you might pop in on a bad patch, but the worst is behind us. I'll let you know when I'm done done with tinkering/tuning. Apologies to you if you got ugly error messages or no response today, and thanks for choosing MVS.

Matthew

Chieber · Post by **Chieber** » 03 Sep 2026, 18:24

Thanks for your hard work!

Is it an idea to make the board only viewable when logged in? Or would that hinder attracting unique visitors, since there’s an extra step involved to view the messages.

Post by **matthew1** » 03 Sep 2026, 18:32

Great question, @Chieber. When not logged in, the board will not show forums or threads to save CPU when the CPU (load) reaches a threshold I've set at roughly 85%. It's a protection measure.

It will show forums and threads over that threshold to logged in users, but will prevent posting and a message appears at the top of pages.

~ ~ ~

Here's interesting data for anyone interested in this arcana.

Post by **matthew1** » 03 Sep 2026, 19:16

Forced logout there, sorry about that.

454cid · Post by **454cid** » 03 Sep 2026, 22:12

Thank you!

Post by **matthew1** » 03 Sep 2026, 22:19

Thank you 454.

Now we're talking:

(If forgot to mention that lower numbers are better on all these charts. Lower = better.)

Post by **volvolugnut** » 04 Sep 2026, 12:57

When I failed to get into MVS yesterday, I expected you were hard at work trying to fix the problem. I just went away and tried again later.
Thanks for keeping up with these problems. I will just continue adding minor content when I can.
volvolugnut

Post by **matthew1** » 04 Sep 2026, 13:16

The junk traffic pushed me over a line and I snapped. I felt like John Rambo (first movie) and went beserk, but in a quiet, keyboard tap tap tap computer nerd way.

FWIW he only iced one guy in that entire movie. I watched it a few weeks ago with my son. Rambo did fire a whole lot of bullets and blew up a kings ransom worth of stuff! Whoo!

Post by **matthew1** » 06 Sep 2026, 09:41

Things are better now. Below is a 7 day chart. The important metric on this chart is load. The 1/5/15 is a trailing average of the server stress, measured in minutes. The big load spike on Sept 3 isn't from bots it's from me tearing configurations out and putting new configs in and rebooting. The everyday load averages are what tells the story. Up to Sept 3 noon-ish is bots, and that morning is when I snapped.

: images-3.jpeg (45.01 KiB) Viewed 553 times

Post by **matthew1** » 08 Sep 2026, 18:55

Sorry if you had a posting problem, or login/logout problem (past ~20 minutes). Still working on the server. Still getting 100:1 bots:humans ratio, up to maybe 5000:1 at times, for the better part of a week.

They are VERY smart now. I block a flood of say memberlist.php bot requests, and they immediately switch to requesting thousands of threads (viewtopic.php) per minute, and when I block that they move immediately to requesting thousands of another type of page. It's a cat and mouse game, but they have an absolute relentless fervor.

They are 100x worse than say three years ago, and at that time they were already 100x worse than three years before that.

The immediacy of how they switch is unnerving.