Server and Performance (now with NimbusHosting from post #129 onwards)

[k0pp0]

c'mon.. It's ITIL time baby!

[charlesr]

Sorry, the host reports there was a router down on one of the 3rd party networks they use, so there would have been some down time between 3 and 8 this morning. Server remained up but unavailable. All looks ok now.

[charlesr]

Currently purging some old sales threads (older than 400 days since last post). Performance might be hit for a bit.

[charlesr]

Currently investigating managed hosting advantages and pricing.

[Spatial]

What's going on with the site at the moment? Seems to be having serious issues

[Spatial]

No seriously, what's going on? It's breaking like a box full of... erm, broken...er...things....

[toythatkills]

The new site is actually called Borders, and then that's followed by whatever the current status of the site is

[Dogg Thang]

Lol.

Why don't we just all agree not to break the boards? Charles, you go first.

[charlesr]

Turns out various IP addresses have been hammering the server with brute force hack attempts.
If anyone can save me some time by helping me with IP blocking setups for the firewall, let me know - meanwhile I have some reading to do.

[koopatroopa90]

Perhaps I am being a little naive but what is the point in hacking a site such as this? Can't see it being worth the effort really...

[Spatial]

With over 10,000 members that's a lot of juicy usernames, email addresses and passwords for them to try and grab for use elsewhere.

[wod]

i hope everything is ok, not been able to access the site for last couple of days through the day but after 5 has been fine. is someone trying to dos attack the forum ?

[charlesr]

Turns out the hack attempts were just coincidentally at the same time as the real reason for the problems. Search.

Various sources say that vbulletin search falls over above ~1m posts. We have 1.5m. Most of the time it works fine and then randomly some searches take 5 minutes and kill the server.
There are alternatives that I'm looking into.

[Bort]

As long as you kept a backup (possibly a legacy separate hosting) you could take huge swinging chunk out of General, Console and Headlines. Online could also be cut but that might be a no go area like First play.
If that was the plan I'd offer a few hours of going through the old posts to see it there is anything that was really worth saving. I just quickly went to random pages and there was sod all that could be of use these days.

[charlesr]

I'm doing some pruning in Headlines, but it's not a solution.
I'm looking at other options.