Now that I've resolved the problem, let me tell you what's going on.
The reason you've been getting timeouts and slow responses is because the internet is literally flooded with bots. Bots are programs that go around the internet doing things. In this case, they're "consuming" content from websites to feed their AI machines. Without first asking if it's OK. And ignoring all the rules that have been established for years. So, I"m blocking them
In the process of doing that, I managed to break the server and had to figure out why. It's now been fixed.
Going forward, our server will still have to process every request the bots make, but now, instead of feeding the bots data from our site, our server will go, Oh, it's you/ Go away. You get nothing.
Hopefully, this will return performance to a reasonable level, but think about this. If we did nothing, we would be forced to pay for a more powerful server to handle the additional load. And the AI bots will pay us nothing for the additional capacity we have to pay for to accommodate them. No Thanks.
I'll leave this up for a few days so everybody can read it. If you want to comment, I've unlocked the thread. If you have questions, I'll answer them.
