The website seems really slow/sluggish for me, has done for a day or so. Viewing threads, posting, etc.
Changing sub-forum, opening a thread, hitting save/submit/edit -- these things all seem to take at least 5 seconds now, based on some quick attempts at timing it.
There's been a massive surge in network traffic in the last day, but I haven't been able to narrow down whether it's DDoS or something else. The surge started at about 6am EST Sept 19. This screen capture of incoming network traffic (blue) shows the relative difference before and after this started, so you can see the difference in magnitude.
The server is handling it, but obviously it's slower. This has happened a few times in the last few month, and it usually stops after a day or two.
I've seen that type of uptick from web crawlers like search engines or archive snapshots, and from people doing mass captures or mirrors of the site.
Usually Google and the big players are careful to rate-limit their requests, it is generally the people doing dumps and mirrors that cause the issues.
There are several good Apache modules to help. Two immediately come to miund. First, mod_ratelimit is supported by Apache, and limits transfer rates per connection. A third party mod_limitipconn limits the number of simultaneous connections by a single address, which can also help. Between the two, most of the bulk pulls can have their impact softened. Few will use distributed tools, sometimes they'll be pulling through AWS but even then it is uncommon to see more than 5-10 IP addresses pulling at once.
