Sal
@Sal@mander.xyz
- Comment on Performance issues? 1 week ago:
No problem! Happy to contribute
- Comment on Performance issues? 1 week ago:
Thanks!
I don’t see those specific IPs, nor 16514. But now I see what scrapers tend to look like in the logs :)
I am now pretty sure that the cause was scraper-like activity coming from the Mlmym front-end that I am serving over an onion site. I am not sure if it randomly started mis-behaving or if a tor scraper was using it.
After blocking this, federation was restored, performance increased, and CPU use came down:
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
I just realized that it is not a ‘scraper’, the requests came from the server that I am using to provide an interface to the site as an Onion site. The amount of requests was suspiciously high so maybe a bot is scraping through Tor. I will leave it off for a few days and see if I can turn it back on later.
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
Thanks! It seems like the lag may have been due to a scraper
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
I did not update or change anything in the past few days.
But, now that you mentioned an AI scrapper I looked into the logs and noticed some heavy requests to the API from a specific IP.
Requests look consistent to scraping - just consistently and continuously issuing GET requests to different API endpoints.
XX.XX.XX.XX - - [14/Oct/2025:21:28:54 +0000] "GET /api/v3/community/list?limit=20&sort=TopAll HTTP/2.0" 403 107 "-" "Mlmym"
I have started denying their requests and it is the first thing that seems to have actually helped!
I don’t want to speak too early but I think you may have identified the cause. Thanks!
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
So far, I have been able to ‘control’ the CPU use by setting limits to the process that pulls stuff from the database (pool size, CPU, memory).
This does release some of the CPU for other tasks, but I think that that what creates the lag might actually be the clogged database queries. So, constraining those resources might not solve the lag problem.
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
Hmm, thanks!
I just made another change. I am not sure why the database suddenly started taking up so many resources, so I have reduced the amount of resources available to it. It did reduce CPU use to 80% as opposed to 100%, but it is still somewhat laggy for me.
- Comment on Performance issues? 2 weeks ago:
I can see that since October 13 the CPU use spiked to 100%…
I just reset the server to check if that would fix it quickly. It don’t think it did.
I can see the processes that are taking up a lot of CPU (parallell database queries it seems), but I still don’t understand what is causing these and why they have spiked since Oct 13. I will need to investigate.
- Submitted 1 month ago to mander@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Wow. This is really magnificent work!! I just had a look through the Wikipedia article of Platynereis dumerilii and I can see from the citation list that you have quite a story with these guys 😁 It is very neat to see how you were figuring out this worm’s phototaxis in 2008 and by now you have figured out a map of the whole thing.
Looking at the movie and the paper I am very intrigued and also a bit intimidated by the complexity! I would really like to get five minutes to experience this worm through your eyes. I will set some time to go through this paper carefully and try to benefit a little bit from your insight.
Thanks a lot for sharing this here, it really is a privilege! Very very cool stuff.
- Comment on Performance Issues August 2025 2 months ago:
Of course, no worries at all! I also was not active. Thank you for pointing it out. I will pay attention.
- Comment on Performance Issues August 2025 2 months ago:
Did you continue to notice these performance issues? I am accessing the site via Firefox again, and I have not yet experienced these issues. But I did notice RAM usage was approaching the 16 GB limit. Rebooting the server brought this back down to ~5 GB, so it is possible that some process is locking RAM over time. I will keep an eye on this and I am looking into upgrading the server infrastructure.
- Comment on Performance Issues August 2025 2 months ago:
At the moment I am away from a computer until next week and so it is difficult to troubleshoot the server. I am not sure why this is happening, I routinely make sure that the server has enough resources and made sure that there would be enough disk space for these weeks while I am away. It could be an intermittent problem with the server provider. Hopefully the issue resolved by itself by now.
- Comment on The 'Heinz Beans' post isn't visible in mander. 4 months ago:
Not intentional!
Took a bit of digging. The post was federated, but it showed up to me as “Removed by mod”:
Looking through the post’s moderation history, I find that the user was banned from community and then unbanned. I also see some removed posts from that same author to that same community around that same time.
My guess is that the most was removed by mod, then restored, but only the removal federated through and not the restore.
I have manually restored it, so you should be able to find it now: mander.xyz/post/977581/19535554
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
You are a radical vegan
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
Unfortunately the universe consists of mostly empty space and the infinitely thin cut passess between sub-atomic particles, barely tickling the vacuum fluctuations
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
Vaccines cure autism
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
But me and you don’t want the same things
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
But a sociopath
- Comment on Let's play this game again 5 months ago:
Permanently magnetized
- Comment on I found Sal. 5 months ago:
Ahh thanks! Great to go back to those days. Really miss recording that show.
- Comment on I found Sal. 5 months ago:
The end of what? When I go to that video on Youtube I enter a continuous ‘live stream’ with no end.
- Comment on I found Sal. 5 months ago:
Are the mods just going to sit there and do nothing while jared doxes me!!!
That ‘every episode compilation’ is great! Skipped through it trying to find my appearance (no success yet) and found many skits I have never seen before.
- Comment on Can we get a lichen/lichenology community? 5 months ago:
No need to be approved! Please, 100%, would love a Lichens community!
- Comment on Lemmy needs more donations 5 months ago:
That is perfectly understandable! The Internet Archive is a worthy project to donate to!
- Comment on Lemmy needs more donations 5 months ago:
That would be awesome! But, of course, always be mindful of your own needs first and it is OK to pick. The fact that you are supporting something through donations is already cool of you. Wikipedia is also a great project to donate to.
- Comment on Lemmy needs more donations 5 months ago:
That’s fair. I have a generally positive opinion of the devs even if I disagree with some of their views. Moderating is not easy, and especially not when you get into heated political territory - that’s why personally I “cheat” a bit by dissuading politics within this instance ;) A small select list of mod actions is not something that sways my opinion. It is tricky to process some reports and sometimes we can make bad calls.
But it is true that this context will affect someone else’s opinion differently, so it is good for others to be aware of some of this context before deciding to donate.
- Submitted 5 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 33 comments
- Comment on Plans to update? 5 months ago:
Sometimes it is also just good or bad luck. This time I got lucky. Last month this instance had about a month of problems because the image hosting provider’s services came down unexpectedly and they took over 3 weeks to fix the issue. I think it is a good idea to have accounts on different instances - and even better - one can create a single-person instance and use that to interact.
Thanks a lot! I appreciate the gesture of donating but it is not necessary, it is not expensive and I have not gone through the process of setting up a donation system. My recommendation in general is to donate to the development directly if you would like to support the lemmy ecosystem: join-lemmy.org/donate
- Comment on Plans to update? 5 months ago:
It is done now :) Sorry for the delay!
