The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Very slow

Cannot believe how long it is taking to go from one thread to another. Anyone else affected by this? Also noticed 1363 guests? Hmmmmmm

Yes, very frustrating. I give up for now. Thought it'd be better this time of nite along with the usual slow down while bolters are out on dates!!

I just got on here after getting a failure notice saying files were missing when I went to the home page and then clicked on the Forums tab.

Currently says me and two other members online, 1162 guests, and 0 robots.

An update to the issue this morning. Took me over 4 minutes to get the main forum page to load just so I could click on the sign in link. Another 2+ minutes to actually get signed in and each page change/activity taking anywhere from 30-60+ seconds to happen. The only thing that seems to happen quickly is if I hit my browser back button. It takes me back to the previous page, but doesn't show that I've viewed/read the post or forum I was looking at and doesn't display a reply I posted. Those changes don't show up until hitting the refresh, which again takes 30-60+ seconds for things to happen.

7 members currently on line and "guests" count when I signed on was hovering around 500+, fluctuating with each page change up to over 700+ at the moment.

On the very high "guest" count numbers, after seeing the numbers jump up to over 1200 a little while ago, I took some screen shots to highlight repetitive IPs and their sources.

As seen in the time stamped screen shots below, at one point there were 506 "guests" originating from IPs 47.79.xxx.xxx, all listed as coming from Alibaba Cloud LLC (a known Chinese company) out of Singapore. Of those at one point there were 34 different IPs beginning with "47.79." reading the very same thread.

The next screenshot shows a second search highlighting 408 "guests" originating from IPs 146.174.xxx.xxx, all listed as coming from Huawei International Pte. (also a Chinese company) out of Singapore too.

Between the two "Datacenter" ISPs, they accounted for 914 "guests" of the 1200 or so "guests" on our site. Just IMHO, but I don't think these are valid "guests". More like unwelcome pests that I'd like to see go away.

Edit for added info: A random "what's my IP" check of over 20 of the Alibaba IPs all showed them to be "blacklisted" for spam activity.

With those anonymous numbers, this has the characteristics of a low level distributed/denial of service attack: See DDOS attack

Paul responded HERE also in the Bus.

I wondered if it was because of the increase in traffic. We continue to have a good number for "Most on Line" ... twice bumped up in only a few days.