Sal
@Sal@mander.xyz
- Comment on Long load times again 21 hours ago:
I have experienced issues both over tor and over clearnet. The tor front-end exists on its own server, but it connects to the mander server. So, the server that hosts the front-end via Tor will see the exit node connecting to it, and then the mander server gets the requests via that Tor server. Ultimately some bandwidth is used for both servers because the data travels from mander, to the tor front-end, and then to the exit node. There is also another server that hosts and serves the images.
What I see is not a bandwidth problem, though. It seems like the database queries are the bottleneck. There is a limited number of connections to the database, and some of the queries are complex and use a lot of CPU. It is the intense searching through the database what appears to throttle the website.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
AGUCUAGCAUAC
- Comment on Long load times again 1 week ago:
This morning I woke up and a new IP sub-net (43.173.0.0/16) was excessively hitting the site from multiple IPs, probably scraping, making the site unresponsive. I blocked that sub-net and the site is responsive again.
- Comment on Long load times again 1 week ago:
Thank you.
A few days ago, I blocked several IP ranges to solve this. I unblocked them about two days ago in an attempt to solve some federation issues… The bots from this IP range came back.
This time I blocked only the IP range that has the most bot-like activity. Hopefully that resolves it.
- Comment on i hate myself and i want to die lol 2 weeks ago:
Woah! Congratulations!!! 🥳 🎉
- Comment on Performance issues? 4 weeks ago:
No problem! Happy to contribute
- Comment on Performance issues? 4 weeks 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? 4 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? 4 weeks ago:
Thanks! It seems like the lag may have been due to a scraper
- Comment on Performance issues? 4 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? 4 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? 4 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? 4 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 2 months ago to mander@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on 2 months 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. 5 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. 6 months ago:
Ahh thanks! Great to go back to those days. Really miss recording that show.
- Comment on I found Sal. 6 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. 6 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? 6 months ago:
No need to be approved! Please, 100%, would love a Lichens community!
- Comment on Lemmy needs more donations 6 months ago:
That is perfectly understandable! The Internet Archive is a worthy project to donate to!
