in reply to Perlmonks site has become far too slow

See Anonymous Google Chrome browsers now under additional scrutiny. We're currently serving/blocking 16 hits/s of bot crawlers, distributed across a lot of IP addresses which I suspect are rented residential IP addresses.

I don't think these crawlers run Javascript, and there is very little to do as we're blocking them as early as possible without moving behind Cloudflare or something like that.

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Re^2: Perlmonks site has become far too slow
by hippo (Archbishop) on May 01, 2025 at 09:57 UTC
    without moving behind Cloudflare or something like that.

    I really hope it doesn't come to that. But if it does, please don't use Cloudflare. You are probably already aware of the reasons I say that but I'll be happy to elaborate (here or in private). Fastly seem to be doing a decent job protecting MetaCPAN and are clearly open to supporting Perl-related sites so they might be a decent candidate. Worth also talking to Pair if you haven't already. If they can't (or won't) keep the bad bots away from a site with their banner on it then that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of their services.


    🦛

Re^2: Perlmonks site has become far too slow
by bliako (Abbot) on May 01, 2025 at 12:22 UTC

    From my side and POV, I think the number of users who disable javascript in their browsers, is small. I know it is an ideological statement and a security precaution, maybe, but it is not practical with current state of the internet, so perhaps not many people use it (i may be wrong of course, and in this case is the edge cases which matter the most!). I know that PerlMonks site prides itself on minimal or little javascript. Rightly so. After this disclaimer, can I dare suggest banning browsers which do not support javascript? That's towards the goal of preserving the site and its accessibility to humans, the big picture. Or, if browsers do not support javascript, redirect them somewhere else. Anyway, the site feels much better now, but as Co-Rion said, that's a rat race, and we lack the long tail.

      Since the crawlers have not signed up yet, all such changes would only affect Anonymous Monk.

      See Anubis for something that could be implemented with relative ease. Instead of building a babel-tower of front-end proxies all needing a container to keep up, Anubis itself could be ported to a Perl function instead by somebody enterprising.

      I do. Well, at least selectively (I enable it when really needed). Mostly as a precaution, but also because I like to keep documents static when possible. As a bonus, it greatly reduces the number of requests. But sure, it's an ideological statement too.

      return on_success() or die;

Re^2: Perlmonks site has become far too slow
by Fletch (Bishop) on May 01, 2025 at 12:37 UTC

    Anecdotal but it does feel a little bit better past day or so (at least fewer outright page won't load instances). Thanks to those trying to keep things going at any rate. In the immortal words of Dr. Rumack, "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.". Wait, that wasn't it . . . "I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you."

    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.
    The cake is a lie.

Re^2: Perlmonks site has become far too slow
by hrcerq (Monk) on May 02, 2025 at 02:53 UTC

    Perhaps, a next move, if needed, might be to use Anubis. I've seen some code hosting services (such as Codeberg and Sourcehut) using it and the protection seems good enough (though really a bit sad that it requires js to work, at least for now). It's a lot better (IMHO, at least) than resorting to Cloudflare.

    It's also described here.

    return on_success() or die;