Database access problems on site

[MandyShaw]

Yesterday and today I have experienced database access error messages:

Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.
Try waiting a few minutes and reloading.

(Cannot access the database)

Backtrace:

#0 /home/cpdlorg/public_html/wiki/includes/libs/rdbms/loadbalancer/LoadBalancer.php(972): Wikimedia\Rdbms\LoadBalancer->reportConnectionError() [etc.]

This happens in many areas of the site, and both on Chrome and on Edge, and both when logged out and when logged in. Refreshing the page usually, but not always, fixes the problem.

I can't see that this has been reported here previously.
Is this a known issue that's being looked at?

Thanks
Mandy Shaw

[choralia]

Hi Mandy, we are experiencing some issues with robots that crawl the whole website at a very high speed, causing a very high server load. We are trying to apply countermeasures, however the situation is still a little bit critical.

Max

[MandyShaw]

Thanks Max, hope the bots lose interest in CPDL soon!

[PeterGibson]

I'm still seeing the same Service unavailable message. Same problem as in the thread "503 Service unavailable" started on 27 July 2024, and this thread from September?
Do the little b*****s never give up?

Peter

[choralia]

I've just blacklisted some IP addresses that had found new ways to produce high server load, and re-activated the so-called "Under Attack Mode" (UAM) offered by our CDN provider. The server load seems normal now.

Max

[MRoth1910]

The site is just unusable at this point. I don't have a more productive comment, but:

the search function doesn't offer suggestions for me at the moment, and the website just gets stuck until the search goes through.

the server times out, or there's an internal server error.

the website loads, but not properly

the SEO is bad again and the composer pages don't show up, but the talk pages, PDFs, etc. do.

[SHaronL]

For the past 2 weeks I've had enormous problems trying to access CPDL main site. Yesterday and today, I have tried multiple times but it will not let me in. I get the "verifying you're human" page, I check the box then get "waiting for site to respond" then after a very long wait I am sent to a Cloudflare page which says "Gateway timeout". What's happening?

I have tried several other ways to get onto CPDL, including Googling a particular composer, bouncing from Wikipaedia, and using a previously saved url, all without success. I am also unable to access CPDL from my iPad, which I keep updated. I'm based in the UK.

I use an old Mac computer with OS 10.13. Is it that CPDL no longer supports older operating systems? I keep this OS because I have had Finale for many years and my version will not work with more modern OSs.

Can anyone suggest how I might get back onto CPDL? Thanks very much.

[PeterGibson]

Patience and persistence?
I've had similar access problems (including the Cloudflare "Gateway timeout" page, which is almost certainly exactly what it says, rather than disguising a problem with old browsers), which appears to be down to bots aggressively crawling the site, making life difficult for real people.

What I take to be the latest defensive measure is that, once logged on, opening a link in a new tab to another page on the site results in the linked page not being logged in automatically.

OTOH, scrub that. It was behaving like that earlier this evening, but I logged on to the CPDL site a couple of minutes ago, and behaviour was normal; that is, new pages open with the user being logged in.

[MRoth1910]

What I take to be the latest defensive measure is that, once logged on, opening a link in a new tab to another page on the site results in the linked page not being logged in automatically.

this is bad! like, I already can't log in with one tab. Making me log in again? That is spammy behavior on our own end. There has got to be a better way, because the site unusable due to bots versus our own defensive actions is indifferent to users at this point.