Noting that our server is suffering a denial of service attack - 44 requests PER SECOND.   Dealing with it as best I can from where I am (I'm on a train - in Lithuania!)

 

OK - dealt with ... the heavy black line is today's worker server load.  Looks dramatic - there was (perhaps) a handful of proper requests that may not have been answered but the server did not fall over.



If you wonder how I find out there's a problem like this, the server sends me a message 

Now in Vilnius

 
"Server slow" but perhaps different reasons.  The number of spiders crawling our site has been creeping up - to some extent as expected once we moved from "http" to "https".   As I see individual spiders adding a significant load, I at taking a look at those that come onto my radar and asking (or forcing) some of the more noisy ones not to index our content. 

In terms of web searches, 19 out of 20 in the UK use Google and the Googlebot is allowed Coffee Shop access just as any human guest might be (so no indexing of things like Frequent posters) but others such as Yandex and Petal which are not widely used in the UK are turned away.  Ironically, Google does not put a big load at all on when indexing - I see it, but it's not effecting performance like (for example) the Petal crawler was earlier today.

It's not just web search indexers that crawl sites ... there are a variety of other companies indexing and selling data to their customers or making use of it within products - from plagiarism identifiers to AI feeds and Search Engine Optimisation tool and link reporters.  In some cases they may do us a bit of good, but as we're not driven by sales volume and income here, and we're very much UK based when they tend to index worldwide, that good if it's there tends to be tangential. 

It's a bit of an ongoing game - others play it too and have things like "Captcha" - "are you really human" test which we could do if we need to.   We do have some logic that spots aggressively or characteristically automated visiting without the need for users to tell us which boxes have motorcycles or stairs (or GWR class 158s!) in them from time to time.   Please let me know if you get a "you are not really human" type message more than very rarely!

 
An update on this one - still being well and truly spidered and no single nasty culprit.  I have made a few ongoing adjustements while static here in Mosjoen - but on the road (or should I say rail?) again from tomorrow and I expect to be mobile for another week or so.

Receptionist and worker loads:





Views from just up the road - one looking forward and one looking back





And even here there are things that remind me of England, and of my home town

 
Our server load is going "through the roof".   But - it's a bit of a "careful what you wish for".  One of the hoped for consequences of going to https (six months ago!) was to make the pages more secure-looking and encourage crawlers ... and they are crawling.   I note Google and Alexa spiders have been especially active over the last couple of days and I am keeping an eye in others.  Here are the browsers that called for over 1000 Coffee Shop responses yesterday

 
4th September 2025

A huge spike in traffic - described elsewhere - but it's starting to effect performance.   I *think* I can isolate a lot of the traffic involved over the next 24 hours - however, as I work on the system you may find that I over-trap some traffic.

If you get error messages for a few minutes over the next few days, or messages telling you ...


please give me 30 minutes or so before your report it ....

 
For us armchair viewers you get a sense of the problem and how it is escalating when you see there have been 2497 "users" on line today - and the record since the forum started is 2526 and that was only a fortnight ago.

 

To give you a comparison - this running traffic level in 10 times the maximum I would expect in any month. 

As a side issue with our (new, moved) hosting space provider,  I asked about adding resource to the virtual server as that would be something of a fix.    That would mean a move off the legacy contract which is in place and a rebuild - possible but prices quoted look like somewhere over (and perhaps well over) a doubling of monthly fees as well which is not an attractive solution, especially at it just raises the lid - potentially - until next time the pan overflows.   So just resizing is neither a long term nor a financial solution.

Edit to add - I will be following up with thoughts within members areas

 
Who pays those fees - is it out of your own pocket Graham? I haven't see any adverts to fund the site.

 

The Coffee Shop and other ran on spare capacity on the servers I used to use as "Well House Consultants" - my IT company that ran from 1996 until a few years ago, and those servers still host legacy sites though they become less relevant.  I love(d) doing the IT stuff and the transport stuff, so asnwe closed down the businesses I have taken on the server costs - for all the sites combined- as a hobby thing.     You can see all the various sites via https://www.sheepbingo.co.uk/error/errorpage.php and if things go almost totally belly-up, it's where you are taken.

My background / career was working with stuff like this, and in addition we have a fabulous voluntary team of moderators and admins, with a membership who are naturally helpful - so there is rarely need to buy extras in beyond coffee beans, and using open source software tends to employ more of my volunteer time than commercial software would,  but saves an awful lot of costs that would-be associated with a commercial and supported setup, and reduces our dependencies on others.

 
I continue to thank grahame for providing all of us with the Coffee Shop forum. 


As an aside, do you know how important coffee is?  Coffee is vital for survival.  Dinosaurs didn't have coffee, and look how that turned out.

CfN 

 

Indeed - and as a more recent example, from Coffee Aid:



And I don't know anyone who was around before 1583 and is still around today - without cofeee they have all perished.

I note that the Grand Cafe has been open rather longer than our Coffee Shop - we will never catch them up.  However, they are now a wine bar and whilst we may do a bit of whining here too, I hope we always have a dominant positive vibe!