Forum has been very slow 2 days now...

[Bo Persson]

Larger sites are seeing the problem too:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/17/ ... es_report/

[towforce]

Larger sites are seeing the problem too:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/17/ ... es_report/

Good find!

Web servers are going to need a feature that lowers the priority of sessions which are consuming a lot of data.

[Eelco de Groot]

If it is not the badly designed crawlers, it could be other resource consuming searches or actions? I wonder if it would help to make the Avatars hardcopied on the site as jpg for instance and preferably a bit larger than they are now? Now they can be links to any website, for instance somewhere in Iran :0 Not that Iran or anywhere necessarily would have to be a problem but potentially a risk I think to the safety of the website.

[smatovic]

In total there are 3988 users online

atm and website is fast.

In about 1/3 of times I open the site it is slow, with users ranging from 1000 to 3000. Thus it might be one specific crawler/scraper who causes the site overload. repeating.

As mentioned, one would need to analyze the web-server log files to figure what is going on, and then tune firewall settings more aggressive.

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Srdja

[Stephen Ham]

Hello Srdja,

Well...today it's EXTREMELY slow and there are only 198 browsers on now.

-Steve-

[Eelco de Groot]

3869 users at the moment and forum is fast enough for me! Not sure what happens. Logging in is quick.

I was surfing at the Museum (MoHPC museum for the RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) the more wealthy students and such had) and I read there they have much the same problems, it helps them to restrict access to registered users but we have a lot of them here (registered users I mean) that are probably bots or duplicates otherwise, so it may not work here to do that. They have a special bot which may be cheaper to do than cloud services for the forum? Maybe we could borrow their HP Bot technology

01/23/25

We continue to have trouble with too many bots (9700 at once), so when the bots are hyperactive, the forum is set so only registered users can use it.

The forum is still there, you just need to log in to see it. If you don't have an account, please contact me (not via a VPN, please) and tell me a little about yourself and your interest.

Forum News

Since December 2024 the forum has been experiencing large server loads due to thousands of “guests” – sometimes 15,000 at a time, on a forum that typically has around 20 logged-in users. These guests are most likely AI training bots, though we have no direct way of knowing what a bot wants. With governments and companies throwing billions of dollars at AI projects, possibly the forum is being read by many competing projects.

The forum now has a bot of its own that shuts off access to guests if loads get too high. If you access the forum, and you get a page that says: "You are either not logged in or do not have permission to view this page...", then this is the work of this load-limiting bot. (At times, the load-limiting bot may also shut down new user registration - however, if you have an account already, you should be able to log into it.) When the load-limiting bot turns off guest viewing (and possibly new member registration), it will turn it on sometime later once the bot load goes down.

On the other hand, if you get "Error 403 - Forbidden", this indicates that your IP address has been blocked. This situation may not change for a long time, however, there are a few workarounds: If you are using a VPN, then turn it off. Much of the bot access is via VPN, so when we block them, we may also block you. If you are sure you are not using a VPN, you can try contacting the curator and he'll see if he can unblock you. Please be sure to include the IP address that you hope to have unblocked.

If you want to become a full member of the forum and be able to post, then please create an account.

My only HP calculator but it got lost somewhere when I had to move and it still had batteries so I fear they now leaked the battery compartment. If I ever find it again. I sure would want it back though, it was a beauty. 600 Dutch guilders back then in the nineteen nineties The manual was a big encyclopedia like tome. If you wanted to program it and not only use the calculator functions, (who did not want to do that?) you basically had to buy their programming documentation as well, which was almost an encyclopedia of its own.

[Pablo2000]

Are these posts back to front? You have to scroll down to the last section to get the latest post?

[smatovic]

Are these posts back to front? You have to scroll down to the last section to get the latest post?

The newest post is on the last page, in forum view, on the right side, after the Authors name, there is an arrow box "go to last post", that link takes you directly to the last post, a shortcut.

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Srdja