A short update as things have been quiet lately.

Image proxy

A few weeks ago I made what was meant to be a temporary configuration change to fix imgur.com images. I set pict-rs proxy cache lifetime to 1h in an attempt to quickly have the system re-download failed images. I forgot to remove this :(

The implications were that images were slow to load on the site as pict-rs had to make its own fetch. This has now been resolved and at least for me the site is running smoother for it.

Bots and Cloudflare

You may have noticed that the Cloudflare outage the other week affected the site. I have been using Cloudflare as an attempt to reduce bot-spam, however it isn’t very effective.

Whilst the site is on good hardware, I do get regular performance alerts due to scrapers hitting the site. At times there are ~5000 concurrent connections. It usually only lasts a few minutes and whilst the site does slow down a little, it isn’t unbearable.

In any case, I plan on exploring the use of Anubis https://anubis.techaro.lol/ as an alternative to Cloudflare. This will (1) reduce reliance on large corporations (2) increase privacy as Cloudflare is a privacy risk (3) combat bot-scraping. It may also effect mobile clients, so I’ll be testing all clients as part of the roll-out.

I’m expecting to work on this at the weekend, however I’ll post another update beforehand.

That’s all for now.