There were a TON of bots using the assets.php page of the Minecraft section of Vizzed lately, peaking at around 180 hits per a minute (and probably would be more if my connections limit was higher). That page, like all of the other pages of the Minecraft directory, connects to an external database. My code didn't properly close the connection to the current database before it connected to the other database, which left those connections to the vizzed database open. They automatically close themselves after 30 seconds, but my database has a 25 max connections limit which means there can only be 25 connections to my database at a time, which results into all other connections having to wait until one of those 25 connections either expires or closes.

Yesterday alone had 272,453 hits on the vizzed.com/minecraft/assets.php page. The site as a whole has been getting a lot of bot traffic lately. I'll be looking into it in the near future to see how much of it is needed and what I can do to reduce the strain that they cause.

For the time being, I made the Minecraft directory only accessible to users; I'll fix it eventually. That resolves the biggest issue, which should make the site better, but still not perfect.

There are still a ton of bots using the site, and they're still navigating other areas of the site. I'll continue to investigate and figure out what I can do about the strain that they're causing.

Could've of been a good opportunity to redirect those bots directly to the board. Lets inflate those page numbers to emulate how active vizzed use to be, and relive the nostalgia.

Jokes aside, atleast now i can resume work on the VGR related stuff that i had push off because of the server strains.

I was wondering what caused so much downtime these past days. Not like I had a ton of free time to invest here, but it was weird not seeing the site up sometimes even for days.

Hopefully we can find out why did we have such a bot storm out of anywhere, and how we can minimize the impact they cause. Would be a very bad start of the year if Vizzed still has these downtimes.

I hope its over. that was like uuuuugh! I mean it was down then back on then started to lag and down again. I thought at first his certificate has expired but it seems it was something else.

I was wondering what was going on, it was kind of making me crazy and hopefully it will be the last of it, I have a video to add to the site tomorrow

boy did I jinx it

As soon said I said it it happened again. Let me know when it fixed for good. I can't stand all the things that's been going on

The site continues to get hammered by bots. I had to temporarily disable the screenshots for guests, because those are also some of the main pages the bots are hitting.

Well I guess it looks like the issue is finally fixed I haven't seen that maintenance screen at all today

classgame: Yeap I think that fixed the issue. Thanks for confirming

But it was a bandaid fix. I still want the screenshots to be available to guests, so I'll be working on finding a solution to that situation over the next week or so.

I just realized that the number of guests on the site took a significant drop. When I disabled the screenshots page, it also disabled the game pages since the screenshots page is embedded into the game's pages. I went ahead and fixed this.

I'm still working on finding a solution for making screenshots available to guests again.

I just made it so that bots can view the screenshots again but I updated my robots.txt file that restricts the bots to being able to only view 1 page per a second. I also restricted them from viewing certain sections of the screenshots page.

If the bots don't obey it, and sometimes they don't, then I'll have to disable it again for guests until I can find another modification. Ultimately, I want guests (or at least Google bots and other useful bots) to be able to view the game screenshots.