Lately I have been seeing quite a few of slow loading pages:

Almost 18 seconds, while everything else is absolutely blazing fast.

How to find out what is going on and what is happening?

Should I try doing some maintenance for the SQL database, could be from there? What can I do about it?

Thank you @Marc Stridgen as always!

Just so I don't leave the situation w/o a resolution.

 

This was in my apache2 server configuration file.

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxRequestWorkers: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxConnectionsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
        StartServers             5
        MinSpareServers          5
        MaxSpareServers          10
        MaxRequestWorkers        150
        MaxConnectionsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

after I dramatically modified them to this:

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxRequestWorkers: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxConnectionsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
        StartServers            20
        MinSpareServers         20
        MaxSpareServers         40
        MaxRequestWorkers       1500
        MaxConnectionsPerChild  1000
        ServerLimit             2000
</IfModule>

# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

Server went back to blazingly fast. 

In the end found out bytedance/bytespider chinese bots were killing the server w/o pretty much no warning or errors. In the end I have found a MaxRequestWorkers too low error.

Then I banned from a firewall bytedance/bytespider bots. 

And now if I could only ban yandex bots I'd be a happy camper.

 

Thank you for sharing

I host my server with Hetzner. They have a very basic firewall and picked up from logs the bytedance ip addresses (which were not so many) and blocked them in the hetzner firewall. I am not so happy with this solution but as a temporary step it works for now. I need to really install a good firewall with ip geocoding and everything.

i gave fiddled witht he prefork a couple of times carefully.. may give it another go as our server is pretty big should be able to handle quite a bit. 

Cleantalk we have banned out certain countreis from registering, that worked a treat and now get very little RU and CN if any. But need to ban them out from the server completely. 

Will have a go this afternoon and see how it goes.

What exactly is Cleantalk? I want also to ban everything CN and RU on my server.

 

Hey !
I encountered  the same problem with AJAX Loading, and I looked everywhere from what It could be, nothing on the server side, nothing in settings. But by updating the version the problem fixed itself.

Try upgrading your version and check again.

Edited February 12, 20241 yr by Alexandru

 

If you go to Members->Content Moderation->Spam Prevention->Geolocation settings, you can add countries in there that you wish to disallow.

Nah, @Marc Stridgen this is for registration. Chinese bots never register, they just flood the server with request and do not respect robots.txt or any rules. Download all photos, everything.

They don't care to register, they just flood it as guests.

 

Nah, @Marc Stridgen this is for registration. Chinese bots never register, they just flood the server with request and do not respect robots.txt or any rules. Download all photos, everything.

They don't care to register, they just flood it as guests.

You'd want to block this at the server or network-level  then if you're seeing this from a particular set of bots.

Exactly what I was saying above.