A post-mortem on site performance issues.
Friday, March 20, 2026 at 06:45:20
What happened?
If you hit Projects recently, you may have noticed the site running slow or not responding.
I can’t be certain, but I think that had something to do with the comments. I decided to re-open them for a while with “hold for approval” selected and some basic keyword filtering to reduce the adult spam. That immediately gained me a list of spam in Cyrillic that, when translated, was more-or-less meaningless, as well as the expected adult website spam. But site performance also started to suffer with random timeouts, poor image retrieval, and just overall slow times. The host’s site tools would similarly time out.
Commenting on boards such as mine is highly weaponized. I expected nothing - and got it. Comments closed, some code was modified to remove the ability to get into the comment form or feed, and that was that.
But, site performance came back pretty much within an hour or two of doing that.
What did I find?
After the two brain cells I have left managed to connect “Site performance better” + “Right after comments closed” = 4, I pulled the logs for the last few weeks. I found what I was looking for:
14.184.185.155 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:02:01 -0400] "GET /projects/index.php/2026/01/15/the-sabtronics-2010a-dvm-part-1-checkout-and-observations/comments/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5646 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36"
216.73.216.52 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:02:26 -0400] "GET /projects/index.php/2025/04/22/two-hamfests-this-weekend-april-26-and-27/comments/feed/rss2 HTTP/1.1" 200 398 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"
85.208.96.201 - - [18/Mar/2026:06:31:10 -0400] "GET /razorback/index.php/2024/08/04/the-dial-lamp-can-be-more-important-than-you-think/comments/ HTTP/1.1" 404 438 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
Just page after page after page of bots like Claude, SEMrush, Petalbot, and countries like Egypt, Viet Nam, China, and Germany slamming the site trying to retrieve the comments feeds on both the production and (now turned off) dev site I was using to test new themes. Once I turned that feed off and removed the dev site, a few more 404s and then the storm was gone.
Analysis and thoughts on the spammers and slammers.
You’ll notice some familiar names in there. Claude, is of course, Anthropic’s AI bot, and it was a very bad actor. I’m considering blocking this one via IP and name just because they are hard on things. SEMRush is SEO, so someone is indexing my site with that. I saw Huawei’s bot, Meta’s bot, ByteDance’s bot, and others, all slamming to get those comments. Same posts, over and over and over. I haven’t even located the comment posters yet, there’s so much noise.
The minute they (comments) were gone, it stopped and performance was back. Would that have eventually slowed as these bots finally filled their need for new URL indexing, or would they have assumed that a comments feed might get comments so it needs to be checked over and over? I have no idea, but regardless of that, comments were not useful on this page and they are gone. Because of the way this blogging platform works, you’ll see “🐗❤️” instead, which just takes you to the post in the main feed, or the top of the post when viewing a single post.
As always, if you’d like to comment on something, please use either Mastodon or the Telegram feeds: Channel Feed and Chat Channel - anyone can join the feed, it generally follows here but I do post one-off shots of things I’m working with or find interesting. The chat feed is by approval, but I generally won’t disapprove unless the person is spamming.
See you at the hamfest!