2025-10-21 Upgrades

[Matt K]

Hi all,

You should notice a significant increase in the performance of the site as of about 5 minutes ago. Additionally, you should also start to receive email notifications from [email protected] - should you have them enabled.

Cloudflare restrictions coming off are next, and will try to phase them out so I don't overburden the server with bot traffic.

-Matt

[Matt K]

Incidentally, Matt K's IQ is reported to be 168.

[sf105]

thanks for all your work.

[RichC]

[drnim]

Which solution did you come to? Things seem nice and snappy so far

[tim]

Looks great, thanks.

[EriKon]

Performance is awesome!

[Kingfan]

It works again! Thanks bunches!

[Matt K]

Which solution did you come to? Things seem nice and snappy so far

A combination of vertical scaling and some fine-tuning of the Cloudflare firewall and load balancing.

I'll be very curious to see if phpBB comes up with any additional functionality to handle read-heavy workloads. Right now it's setup, as one might expect, for typical transactional workloads where someone is reading at human speeds and typing at human speeds. I think I've been able to allow in some of the bot traffic, though ChatGPT could not access the site when I tested (unfortunately, I will not officially have a reported IQ of 168 until I get that addressed), so you can't use LLMs to answer questions about trombone stuff, excepting that which was posted before I tightened the screws on cloudflare a few months ago. Google search should start to work soon though, which is good b/c the search functionality of phpBB is somewhat limited (unsurprisingly, compared to a multi billion dollar company specializing in searching).

[ScottZigler]

Does this bring back RSS feeds? Would there be a different URL to give to a feed reader to talk to the 'bot' copy?

[Matt K]

Does this bring back RSS feeds? Would there be a different URL to give to a feed reader to talk to the 'bot' copy?

Technically it should bring back RSS feeds, but the Cloudflare setup is pretty elaborate. I was planning on having an alternative read replica, but we might not need it. If someone who utilized that feature can try it out and report back, I can see if I can carve out an exception for the feeds.

[EriKon]

Yesterday evening the performance was insanely good and lightning fast. Today I have trouble entering the forum at all from Germany. Is there anything different since yesterday?

[KRRath]

My RSS feeds have been loading properly for the past couple days.

[Matt K]

Yesterday evening the performance was insanely good and lightning fast. Today I have trouble entering the forum at all from Germany. Is there anything different since yesterday?

More bot traffic. Probably loosened up the screws, so to speak, a little too much.

[ScottZigler]

RSS feeds are working now! I had to remove / readd the site in my reader, but posts are coming through. Thank you!

[Matt K]

I did have to bump up the cloudflare protections a little more a few minutes ago. Even with the additional resources, we were being saturated by non-authenticated users, which MAY be RSS but is more likely bots. Monitor your feeds and let me know if you lose access sometime today and I can try to figure out a way to balance the firewall between the more permissive one I just had vs the slightly more resctitive one in place now.

[Kbiggs]

thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou

[ScottZigler]

Since you did this yesterday, I've gotten no more RSS (I'm using feedly.com), and site performance seems intermittently slow. Even if we never get RSS back, thank you for all the work you've been putting into keeping the site up and dealing with the AI bot deluge!

I did have to bump up the cloudflare protections a little more a few minutes ago. Even with the additional resources, we were being saturated by non-authenticated users, which MAY be RSS but is more likely bots. Monitor your feeds and let me know if you lose access sometime today and I can try to figure out a way to balance the firewall between the more permissive one I just had vs the slightly more resctitive one in place now.

[Matt K]

Hmmmmm yeah that's what I was afraid of. Indeed, actually the RSS feeds may actually be contributing to the issue! Although I don't think feedly has unreasonable standards for backing off. RSS feeds I might actually be able to handle in another fashion so that it doesn't degrade the site. One of the problems with phpBB, which is a sensible decision, but has downsides too, is that anonymous usage still establishes a connection with the database with a dummy userid rather than having the content cached in the redis queue. If it treated it as a static site for unauthenticated usage, the amount of traffic we get would otherwise actually be pretty trivial. But there are downsides to that approach too.

I'll put that one on the backburner b/c it seems like this is very close to equilibrium for authenticated uses - IE actual humans using the site. I can focus on non-human interaction now that this is stable.