Is it just me or has this site gotten really slow?

[MegDreamsofBooks]

AI bots is a pretty logical explanation for the performance impact. I hope the site admins can get a handle on that soon, because the site is nearly unusable for me this morning. Many times I click on a page and it just doesn't even try to load, which is worse than the slow loading I've been getting over the past few days.

[Cactus Chef]

Site is back to "usable but slow" for me, with 67k guests visible.

So it seems like 100k is likely the threshold after which the backend server starts to fall over. Not that I'm suggesting there's a hard-coded limit or anything.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Where do you see how many are online at MR?

It is at the bottom of the Main forum index

[ownedbycats]

My connection outright fails now. Ran a tracert, and it doesn't seem a local issue, hetzner servers are in Germany.

Tracing route to mobileread.com [162.55.243.172]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  puma7-atom [192.168.0.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    14 ms    11 ms    21 ms  ns-ytwr-pe102.ns.eastlink.ca [173.212.127.153]
  4    12 ms    12 ms    14 ms  host-24-215-102-45.public.eastlink.ca [24.215.102.45]
  5    16 ms    16 ms    16 ms  ns-hfxw-dr001.ns.eastlink.ca [24.222.184.34]
  6    12 ms    14 ms    15 ms  ns-hfxw-br001.ns.eastlink.ca [24.215.102.161]
  7    36 ms    34 ms    36 ms  host-24-215-101-230.public.eastlink.ca [24.215.101.230]
  8    35 ms    37 ms    33 ms  195.22.195.0
  9   128 ms   128 ms   127 ms  89.221.34.115
 10   124 ms   123 ms   121 ms  213.144.184.91
 11   125 ms   128 ms   125 ms  core23.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.224.77]
 12   125 ms   129 ms   127 ms  ex9k2.dc18.fsn1.hetzner.com [213.239.229.106]
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Trace complete.

I was able to plug in a VPN to the browser (ads make my mobile connection unusable) but thats not really a permanent solution.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by MegDreamsofBooks

AI bots is a pretty logical explanation for the performance impact. I hope the site admins can get a handle on that soon, because the site is nearly unusable for me this morning. Many times I click on a page and it just doesn't even try to load, which is worse than the slow loading I've been getting over the past few days.

I wonder if someone is DDoSing the site.

Wild theory: Maybe Amazon doesn't like us sharing anti-DRM findings.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by MegDreamsofBooks

AI bots is a pretty logical explanation for the performance impact.

Most of the results of a search on AI crawlers are articles about the havoc they are wreaking.

I heard on the radio yesterday that the NYT have reached an agreement with amazon to pay the NYT for content access, including for AI training and that NYT is suing some other AI company, which is claiming fair use.

Maybe AI web crawler victims should also start suing for financial damages from denial of service.

[Graham44]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Wild theory: Maybe Amazon doesn't like us sharing anti-DRM findings.

I wouldn't put it past them. I don't know anything about how one goes about attacking a website (thankfully) but I'm guessing all they'd have to do is set their AI after Mobilereads and let it do whatever you do in an interweb attack

[ownedbycats]

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/c...elevant-facts/

On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called "AI Labyrinth" that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. The tool will attempt to thwart AI companies that crawl websites without permission to collect training data for large language models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT.

Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is probably best known as a company that provides infrastructure and security services for websites, particularly protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious traffic.

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare's new system lures them into a "maze" of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler's computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler's operators that they've been detected.

"When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them," writes Cloudflare. "But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I wonder if someone is DDoSing the site.

Wild theory: Maybe Amazon doesn't like us sharing anti-DRM findings.

Next time the site gets slow, I'll run a ping and a trace and see what happens.

[JSWolf]

I still think if we could limit the number of guests that may help.

I really cannot imagine 9106 real guests at one time.

[ownedbycats]

Still getting timeouts on a non-VPN connection.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Still getting timeouts on a non-VPN connection.

For me it has been fine since yesterday.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Still getting timeouts on a non-VPN connection.

Using a VPN is the only thing that works for me, too. Very annoying. I suppose my IP will recycle eventually; hope it’s sooner rather than later.

[JSWolf]

I'm not having any problem with slowness today.

[BetterRed]

Got a gateway timeout late last week (it's Monday here) otherwise OK down here.

BR