Masses of server errors on two forums

[MentaL]

Thanks. I wouldn't understand what I was doing or why though

It'll just disable all the plugins on the forum. Handy if your stuck or want to confirm it's a plugin.

 

[Alvin63]

Thanks. I deleted them all - currently waiting to see if any come back. Seems odd it was all just on one day though (Friday).

 

[Alvin63]

Decided to upgrade all three forums to XF 2.3.6 and Resource Manager update as well. Seems to be ok for now.

 

[Mendalla]

Thanks. I deleted them all - currently waiting to see if any come back. Seems odd it was all just on one day though (Friday).

I've had them intermittently for a couple weeks but the vast majority came on Thursday (I have over 8000 server errors and probably 7000 plus from Thursday). So something seems to have happened end of the week. I just disabled the one add-on that seemed to be the source and will monitor for now to see if that rectifies the problem. If so, then I can take this to the thread for that add-on and just not use it for the time being. As I told my other admin, we only have one add-on now that's of any real importance. The rest are nice to haves.

 

[StarArmy]

Let's change the way you're looking at this - you keep thinking it's something wrong with the way your forum is set up, but what if the issue is that your forum is being overrun by spam bots creating too many connections because too many spambots are visiting the site at the same time (along with search bots, AI scrapers, and whatever else is also visiting).

• Have you looked at your server access logs for the periods in which the error occurred?
• Do you have any sort of DDOS protection/bot traffic filtering like using Cloudflare or similar?

It seems like most errors I get these days are from ridiculous amounts of automated traffic that comes in large bursts and I'm wondering if it's affecting your forum in a similar way. The reason I ask is because at least one of the example errors you posted had what looked like a spam thread title in it.

 

[Mendalla]

Let's change the way you're looking at this - you keep thinking it's something wrong with the way your forum is set up, but what if the issue is that your forum is being overrun by spam bots creating too many connections because too many spambots are visiting the site at the same time (along with search bots, AI scrapers, and whatever else is also visiting).

• Have you looked at your server access logs for the periods in which the error occurred?
• Do you have any sort of DDOS protection/bot traffic filtering like using Cloudflare or similar?

It seems like most errors I get these days are from ridiculous amounts of automated traffic that comes in large bursts and I'm wondering if it's affecting your forum in a similar way. The reason I ask is because at least one of the example errors you posted had what looked like a spam thread title in it.

That wouldn't explain the template errors though, which always happen in conjunction with the connection errors and are always from the same add-on. So for now, I'm going to keep pursuing that angle. It has been 24 hours since I disabled the add-on and all is quiet so far. Going to keep monitoring for the rest of the week. Based on what I have seen so far, it happens ever couple days so a week should be enough.

But that's a good idea in general and would be worth pursuing in the absence of the evidence pointing to the add-on.

 

[StarArmy]

Makes sense. Actually, thinking back, I recall I had something similar where an outdated style (an old holiday themed one) was causing similar errors. They only happened when someone had set a preference for that style/theme. In the end the solution was removing the outdated template.

 

[Alvin63]

Let's change the way you're looking at this - you keep thinking it's something wrong with the way your forum is set up, but what if the issue is that your forum is being overrun by spam bots creating too many connections because too many spambots are visiting the site at the same time (along with search bots, AI scrapers, and whatever else is also visiting).

• Have you looked at your server access logs for the periods in which the error occurred?
• Do you have any sort of DDOS protection/bot traffic filtering like using Cloudflare or similar?

It seems like most errors I get these days are from ridiculous amounts of automated traffic that comes in large bursts and I'm wondering if it's affecting your forum in a similar way. The reason I ask is because at least one of the example errors you posted had what looked like a spam thread title in it.

Does that apply to me too? I could go with that because I recently had a spam issue pushing me over daily email quota - got that sorted by switching to SMTP, increasing the daily quota and switching to cloudflare turnstile. But I'm still getting the occasional bounced email in the contact us email (from fake email addresses trying to sign up - bounced activation emails).

 

[Opus X]

Shared hosting. Mine were mostly on Friday.

from reading that is probably your max user connections problem.
shared hosting usually only allows a set number of connections.
you may have exceeded them.
i do not have that issue since my site is running on a virtual server.
the admin of it has settings that work well for my traffic but he said if it picks up he can change it.

 

[Rhody]

I get these when the hosts sql server goes down. It may be an issue with that.

 

[Mendalla]

from reading that is probably your max user connections problem.
shared hosting usually only allows a set number of connections.
you may have exceeded them.

But what is causing those large numbers of connections? In my case, I get a wave of them and then it stops so it can't be regular traffic. In fact the latest wave happened overnight when only the two members outside North America are generally active so during a period of low activity. Increasing the max connections might fix it, but it won't be getting at the root cause.

 

[Mendalla]

I get these when the hosts sql server goes down. It may be an issue with that.

I have had them happening with the board active so unlikely. Users should be impacted if the back end is down.

One thing I have not checked is whether any cron jobs are running that coincide with the waves. Not likely given I only have the out of box XF jobs and some relating to add-ons but it's something that I have not checked.

I have determined that the template errors are a separate issue. They stopped when I disabled the add-on but we another wave of connection issues after that. So if there's a connection, it is likely that the add-on's issues is triggered by the connection errors.

 

[Opus X]

But what is causing those large numbers of connections? In my case, I get a wave of them and then it stops so it can't be regular traffic. In fact the latest wave happened overnight when only the two members outside North America are generally active so during a period of low activity. Increasing the max connections might fix it, but it won't be getting at the root cause.

bots hitting your site?
i know tracy had mentioned in our staff area an issue and made a post about it.

Guest surge in visitor list from Brazil

Anyone notice a sudden influx of guests hitting your site from Brazil and hitting the error page (denoted by the exclamation mark in the triangle if using Xenforo)? I was online recently and noticed that I had 58 guests visiting. When looking at the members online list, the majority of them had...

admin-junkies.com

 

[Mendalla]

The only surge I have seen is that damn new Meta bot that Sim added to Known Bots recently and now that I know what it is, I've added it to robots.txt as a Disallow. My Robots page is now down to 12 from around 40 so it was accounting for most of my bot traffic. Not sure if it was the problem or not, though. We've now gone a week with no further server errors but I only just put that into my robots.txt yesterday, so there must have been something else causing those surges.

Currently, most of my guest traffic is coming from data centers using IP addresses owned by Huawei, the Chinese phone and network equipment provider. Maybe they are running a bot or hosting bots for somebody.

 

[Opus X]

the ones he talked about did not show up as robots.
they show up as guests.
he uses cloud flare and it blocks a lot of bots.
when he did challenges to the countries those numbers went down.
when he removed them it started back again.
i had to agree it seemed like some type of bot.