Tuesday, January 21, 2025

server overloaded

 Lots and lots of server issues over the last 4 days, on some of our Moodle instances. Tried blocking bots on the ssh port, tried adding robots.txt to prevent excessive crawls, still, 30+ alerts from the server from last night ~8.30 pm onwards up to this morning. Finally, upsized the web server to 7 GB RAM (at double the cost) and the alerts stopped. So, it was human traffic that was probably to blame.

Checking logged in users on Moodle, for instance, via Site Administration > Reports > Live logs showed more than 20 users actively editing courses.

(Had tried blocking bots using

https://techexpert.tips/apache/apache-blocking-bad-bots-crawlers/

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (gumgum-bot|postmanruntime|ag_dm_spider|scrapy|chimebot|SeekportBot|Amazonbot|SemrushBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

But since the root cause was human users, this did not have much effect.)

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