Unresolved still.

Still occurance here, but much faster resolution, under 10 minutes from time down to back up.

Database Error still happened a few times today. It comes back online after about 5-10 minutes for me.Safari browser.

Tech made another change this morning. If there are any other instances of the db error, please let me know.

Just now (4 p.m. EST); lasted about 5 minutes.

Still getting DB error about 50% of my tries.

I can't find a pattern but it's been hit or miss all day and device does not matter.

Thanks for chasing this, but still getting the db error through the weekend and on and off all day today

Been happening all day as late as 7pm est.

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The BF server will ping but still fail to resolve references, ie DB errors. I verified this 15 minutes ago when I could not get to any BF links via two diff browsers. Its a code error, hopefully they can isolate and fix ...

The BF server will ping but still fail to resolve references, ie DB errors. I verified this 15 minutes ago when I could not get to any BF links via two diff browsers. Its a code error, hopefully they can isolate and fix ...

Just returned a bunch of database errors, but then a few minutes later I am able to enter & browse.

I trust ya. For me at least, there has been perfect correlation between status at iidrn and my ability to use the forum. I don't think user browser and system matters, but for ref, I'm Firefox on an Android device.

I'd be curious to know if the BF servers can sense a web crawler and disengage with or block only that, or needs to reboot to restore function.

I imagine that would turn into a game of whack-a-mole. Any web crawler large enough to effectively execute a denial-of-service attack on the BF server(s) would likely be coming from multiple places at once (or nearly at once).

The BF admins should be able to identify the culprits and threaten their ISPs with total blockage. Whatever it is, it certainly seems not to be well-behaved. OTOH, the BF robots.txt file is pretty skimpy, disallowing the ChatGPT bot, a few specific pages, some Google thing I don't recognize as a typical search engine crawler, and imposing a one-second delay only on Bing's crawler. If clients are ignoring the specific disallow entries (which mostly look like they would cause database activity), they should definitely be blocked strenuously. If more than Bing might hit the server too hard, I'd add a larger crawl delay and apply it to all crawlers, something like

Another step might be to beef up the hardware. I don't know what Internet Brands uses, but in this day and age, it seems their servers should be hosted in the cloud with near real-time expansion of capacity as needed.

Tech did add a 5 second delay over the weekend (which looked like it did not do much, as a lot of you were still experiencing the error). It was then changed back to a one second delay yesterday. An IP was banned, but the errors still persisted. There's nothing starkly out there that points towards why we were experiencing the db errors. But it seems to have died down today- I at least have not come across any errors...

The server logs must give you an idea which domains are hitting the server the hardest. Also, the robots.txt file is advisory. Clients agree to adhere to its dictates, but there's no enforcement. It's possible someone is either ignoring the crawler delay or hitting one or more of the disallowed URLs. In either case, that would warrant a block. If you banned a single IP, might it have just been a poorly behaved homegrown crawler? If it was a larger crawler, they would likely have hit you from multiple IP addresses, so you might have to block a larger block of addresses.

Also, sticking a modern web server like nginx in front of your actual web server (if you haven't already) could give you more knobs to turn regarding blocks, pauses, blacklists, etc.

I am not tech so I do not know exactly what they did. They easily could have done more than what I relayed as it was pushed to different teams. Regardless, whatever it is that they did or did not do specifically, seems to have worked as there were no reports yesterday about any database errors.

Thanks IBkatherine. Since this is/was such a pervasive problem, it would be nice to get an after action report from the tech team.

I've been good after 12:00 PM Eastern today (mobile and computer browser.)

All quiet on this front.

It's nice these days to not be alone in problem solving; If you can't find an answer online, you can find someone online who has answers. Unless you can't get online.

Fixed for me.
Thanks Mods!

It's back . . .

I just got a db error too. There's not much we can do as my work day is almost over, but if it continues and worsens over the weekend we will investigate on Monday.

Agree it has been on again/off again the past hour or two.

Me too, but not down long (time it took to do a system update), perhaps indicating a good fault recovery.