skirtcafe.org

crfriend wrote: ↑Fri Aug 29, 2025 11:32 am What I do notice is that with SSL turned off (NOT recommended!) it's MUCH faster, but entirely insecure, and this tends to bolster my opinion of general heavy loading on a resource we likely share with hundreds of other sites (some of which no doubt dwarf us) and probably some "A.I." foolishness soaking up all available computing cycles.

Something I haven't seen in a while is SSL connections being slow due to running out of randomness. It happens on VMs sometimes, but I thought it was a solved problem these days...

I'm on a couple of phpBB powered forums and they are reporting Denial Of Service attacks on their boars from Singapore and Hong Kong. Those forum managers seemed to think the attacks will quit in a week or two after they yield nothing.

OK, this makes some sense. With the current World Order (or lack thereof) we can expect bad actors to act badly, and I have lots of errors from Singapore and PRC in the error log from the forum. I'm also seeing IP addresses throwing errors from the vicinity of 43.157.175.122 which has no "whois" reference to it, so I wish somebody would cut that piece of fibre.

I know there are a lot of countries that are torqued off at the USA right now, but these sorts of shenanigans only hurt little folks, not the ones that need hurting.

An observation from "The Back Room".

Of the last 100(+/-) 'newbies' who had to be banned/deactivated,
99% of them were using IP's from Amsterdam. Most of them showed
up, multiple times, on a 'anti-spam' website.

Similarly, their email address domains appeared as well, with the
'domains' appearing as a 'cosmic-creation', and VERY laughable.
(Many included '.ru' as part of the domain name.)

Again, this is as observation from "The Back Room".

(Hey boss - I need a new mop to replace this ratty thing.
The water bucket hasn't rusted through - yet)

Uncle Al

Sounds like the problem has gone? I feel the site is back to its usual speed since 2-3 days now

Is it me or is the site suffering from a massive slow-down again? I'm finding I get 503 errors as often as not and it's painful waiting for a page to actually load. This is been for the last couple of days?

Unfortunately, this stuff runs in cycles, so it comes at us in waves, and it has to do with the load on the VMs that are part of the cloud that our hosting provider runs -- and they're not really staying on top of the performance or there may be DDOS attacks in progress. I don't have access to that sort of data, so I'm as blind as everybody else. But, yes, it has been noticed.

The 503s speak to that as that's typically associated with high loads on the computers.

Based on performance on 2026-02-19, it looks like our hosting provider has solved the contention problem (again) and, thus, I'm going to sound the "all-clear" on things. Of course, I may get proved wrong, but that wouldn't be the first time...

I tried to comment earlier that it had improved, but sadly it was just after I commented on something else so was prevented. I presume the block was lifted at some point but by then I'd forgotten.

There does likely remain something that sits atop the software that drives Skirt Cafe, but I haven't got access to anything regarding it. My suspicion is that it's "security" software or something like that, and it tends to throw 500-series errors. It tends to disrupt detailed technical communication -- which, for a technician -- is a real pain in the backside.

I may have spoken a bit soon. Some of the slowness has returned with the occasional 503 in the mix. I hope this gets solved soon.

The site has been slow over the last day, but may be this is the reason

Most users ever online was 5440 on Sat Feb 21, 2026 4:14 pm

I Guess MIS is gaining traction on the web.......

Mouse wrote: ↑Sun Feb 22, 2026 7:50 am The site has been slow over the last day, but may be this is the reason

Most users ever online was 5440 on Sat Feb 21, 2026 4:14 pm

I Guess MIS is gaining traction on the web.......

I'd like to think so but of course a few of those users may be orphan threads where the sessions crash at the user end but still need to time out at the server end before being dropped.
As for gaining traction, lets hope it spreads to on the street as well