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hitagi@ani.social

[Cancelled] Server Maintenance - Feb ~~14~~ 21 at 22:00 UTC (status.ani.social)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by hitagi@ani.social to c/meta@ani.social

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It's been a while since I've made these type of posts but there'll be a server maintenance that will (hopefully) address the recent Lemmy-UI problems.

edit: I'm going to cancel this because the problem has been solved by blocking excessive crawling/scraping bots. No more crashing and zombie processes.

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[–] hitagi@ani.social 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

They only seem to be scraping the lemmy-ui frontend and not the others. I'm actually not 100% sure if it's scraping but this is what it looks like:

All from the same IP range in Singapore. A huge spike in requests (up to almost 5k per minute) matches the time when Lemmy-UI crashed last night.

I captcha'd the ASN (it's Alibaba btw) for now (I don't know if that's okay to do, hopefully I'm not blocking real people) but perhaps there are better solutions like ratelimiting.

Anyway, let me know if you're still having trouble accessing the site. The filter should only cover that particular ASN for now.

[–] SatouKazuma@ani.social 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Whoa. Was there anything else going down in that time frame? I'd be interested to have some profile on the attacker. Do you have any information about where the majority of ani.social's traffic came from before that?

[–] hitagi@ani.social 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Nothing else went down. After blocking the ASN, I found out that they've been scraping the site from Hong Kong too but not as aggressively with Singapore. Or rather, the Hong Kong servers are more consistent but not as ~~frequent~~ bursty (I don't know how best to describe it lol). The only info I have is the ASN which points to the Alibaba Group. It also doesn't disclose what it is other than "Microsoft Edge Windows" which is not very nice in my opinion.

Cloudflare only gives me logs for the past 24 hours but most of ani.social's traffic comes from other instances federating in (unsurprisingly, Lemmy.World is #1).

Some graphs if you're interested:

The green line is Singapore. This happened a few hours after the crash the other night.

This is a closer look of the spike. The lines are 5 of their IP addresses. You can see that they're dormant then suddenly they start hammering the instance with requests.

These are the top countries for the past 6 hours that use GET after filtering out Alibaba. United States is high because they have a lot of web crawlers/scrapers like Open AI (at least they're honest) but I might block the AI ones too.

[–] SatouKazuma@ani.social 3 points 4 months ago

I'd almost be concerned that it's a nation state at that point.