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in reply to It's FOSS

Wow! Never thought about it. Yes, this totally makes sense.
Another temporary solution (instead of blocking Mastodon user-agent) could be blocking all media sent to that agent, to decrease traffic.
I hope there will be a fix sooner than later, this is a really bad side effect of #Mastodon. BTW what about other #fediverse back-ends, same issue?
in reply to It's FOSS

maybe someone can enlighten me, but wouldn't it be possible to make kind of a bundle. Instead of having each make a request that needs enough resources to impact a site, have one that kind of prepares whatever is needed for the preview and than just hand it out with minimal resources whenever it's needed? For me a site kinda should be like that without to much of a problem, or maybe ads Loading tracking stuff is what makes it resource intensive? Idk, not though knowledge about web.
in reply to It's FOSS

I hope you’re using a cdn in front of your site, I used to work in media and would have sites survive advert and call to action spikes on tv. Also if you reduced the amount of third party scripts and ads on your site it would help.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to It's FOSS

Boosting this for reach. I hope that this gets fixed quick!
in reply to It's FOSS

That's the waf/cdn problem you're using. It is well known that shitflare is a most crappy company with the very bad behavior and policies as well. Yes, Mastodon issue it is too, but not only their. You're also a pretty lucky that shitflare doesn't ban your domain and/or domains/ip's of your readers/users, what they are doing very often.
Just report this problem to Mastodon support and wait for the fix/solution from them. You can also temporarily use some url shortener/redirect service.
in reply to It's FOSS

I am really surprised this have not been fixed yet...
in reply to It's FOSS

I wonder why it needs to generate thumbnail/preview again and again when viewing the original post from other instances?
imo it will be way simpler if the thumbnail is generated once (when initially posted) and then stored on that original instance. And when the post is viewed/boosted that stored thumbnail will be transferred along instead of re-generating from the source url.. 🤔
in reply to It's FOSS

I assumed CDN's reduced/eliminated Slashdot effect like these a long ago? Like can't mastodon UAgents be redirected to CDN's caching name and image?
in reply to It's FOSS

Have you considered doing static versions of the pages you share to Mastodon, and sharing those links instead? JS is almost entirely bloat and overhead.
in reply to It's FOSS

IMHO this is not specific to #Mastodon... not even to a federated system.

It could also happen, if an URL of your site would be mentioned for example in an article on an online news portal with a large user base... then starting to visit your site.

So any unusual peak in traffic...

in reply to It's FOSS

so you're saying it sucks, but targeted towards the right things we can "oopsie" DDOS something bad, huh?
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to It's FOSS

You do realise that this is not a Mastodon problem per se, but rather an @itsfoss problem? The problem is the handling on the server side. The fact that Mastodon does a preview and queries the server is one thing, but the answer is the server's business.
Today it's Mastodon and if @itsfoss can't handle the query/response then the ball is in your court. Balancing and such.
Surely you are not saying that it only takes like maybe ten users (at a time) to share a link and you're DDOSed??
in reply to It's FOSS

Can you set up a rule to serve a cached version if the user agent is a mastodon instance?
in reply to It's FOSS

I've hosted a popular gaming website on the free hobby tier on vercel for years and never had any load issues even around the biggest events of the year which nearly knocked out 80% of my monthly bandwidth within 3 days. Clearly whatever you are using isn't worth the money.

Edit: might as well mention that this was a Next.js page using the old pages API with full hydration and every page what images in the meta tags too

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to It's FOSS

you take your site off the web and go back to printing it on paper and handing it out to people on the street.
in reply to It's FOSS

This is ridiculous. My website served dynamic content to 1 million visitors for 30 cents a few weeks ago. It remained responsive. If all 18k instances on the fedi requested my site, it would cost half a cent.

You should look into changing whatever hosting provider you have to something that's more economical or powerful. Your ads could fund this. If Mastodon can DDoS you, a bad actor easily could.

In addition, you can cache HTML for mastodon via Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/troubleshooting/customize-caching/#before-you-begin

in reply to It's FOSS

I wonder if it'd be possible to generate a static stub HTML with just the preview info, and serve that to masto bots. After all, a small image, a heading and a couple of fields of metadata won't consume much bandwidth, or server resources - the stub needs to be generated only when the article itself changes, and serving a couple of k is fast and very resource-friendly.
in reply to It's FOSS

We have many many times your followers, often have posts massively shared, and never encountered a problem with it.

What are you server specs?

in reply to Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮

@gamingonlinux on the news website, we have a 2 CPU, 2 GB RAM server. On the main itsfoss website, we have 4 CPU, 8 GB RAM server. Both are on Digital Ocean and we use Ghost CMS with Cloudflare for caching.
in reply to It's FOSS

so you’re using their pretty small cloud VPS then, that on top of how ridiculously heavy your site is (which others have pointed out) is not helping
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to It's FOSS

We need to talk about your site endlessly loading data (it's currently at 198mb) for ads and god knows what else
in reply to It's FOSS

Yes, it is a problem for the page of @Teri_Kanefield as well. It's hard to handle for anyone who wants to just host a website and posts links on Mastodon.
in reply to It's FOSS

I saw the headline and was prepared for some kind of entitled or otherwise stupid thing, but when I read what his reason was, I immediately became a convert. I understand his problem.

If main Mastodon doesn't fix this soon, maybe the upcoming hard fork can prioritize it? @are0h

in reply to It's FOSS

it sounds more like the site's issue for not being able to handle ~100 requests per second
in reply to It's FOSS

What you need is server side caching: https://www.nginx.com/blog/benefits-of-microcaching-nginx/
I was involved once in hosting a Ghost blog and it was a must.
in reply to It's FOSS

I see a strong irony in a publication that’s literally all about FOSS saying *someone else* should fix this problem. If you want to see something fixed in a community-powered, open source project, why not roll up your sleeves and get to work on it?
in reply to Graham Lea

@evolvable, why do you think an end user of an open source project should also be capable of fixing issues in the project's codebase?

By this logic, only developers should use an open source project or they should keep their mouths shut about the issues they encounter.

in reply to It's FOSS

That’s not what I was saying. Just thought an article that’s essentially asking “Why hasn’t this community of non-profit employees and volunteers fixed the thing that I think is most important in this software I’m not paying for?” was pretty odd, especially from an outlet familiar with the trade-offs of FOSS.
in reply to It's FOSS

I feel that boosting this is like when someone reply to all, to say that you should not reply to all.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to It's FOSS

Your page loads 6MB of data with uBlock Origin, 55MB without it and never stops piling on more and more. Seems to load some Google Ads garbage over and over again?

In the time between the first sentence and now, it loaded 30MB more data. Please fix your site.

in reply to Latte macchiato :blobcoffee: :ablobcat_longlong:

you know not to start shit but i don't think that google analytics and other trackers are very free and open source software
in reply to Amber

is it really mastodon links that cause this headache ​:thonk:
in reply to Amber

@puppygirlhornypost @privateger ads are served from their own servers. They will not increase the load on the website server.
in reply to It's FOSS

If this were true, why are you yourself sharing it on Mastodon?

This is highly inaccurate misinformation, and I'm assuming the people whom work there know enough about computers to know this.

Please issue a correction and an apology.

in reply to It's FOSS

Ok maybe its not misinformation that its a ddos threat for YOUR current servers, but to imply that it's a Mastodon issue and not an Its FOSS issue, is misleading and inaccurate.

A single website visitor from twitter could ddos a server if its weak enough, but Mastodon itself is even run on home lab servers.

If you want to republish the article as 'It's FOSS isn't willing to put a very small amount of effort into scaling to support FOSS social media users' then it would be accurate.

Look, It's FOSS is a great publication and people like it, myself included. Don't let one bad article tarnish the reputation.

in reply to It's FOSS

It's quite telling that there are several comments telling you how you could be handling this on your side. There is clearly an issue on the Mastodon side, but you are not powerless either and can configure things differently on your end to better manage the situation. I'm guessing you didn't realise that was the case. Also, it seems unlikely that Mastodon traffic is going to be enough to defeat Cloudflare CDN.
in reply to It's FOSS

🤔 ein wirklich interessanter und wichtiger Aspekt, den ich hier auch nicht kleinreden will. Aber der Lösungsansatz, die User zu bitten, keine Links mehr zu verbreiten, ist sinnlos. Für entsprechende Performance eines Servers oder einer Farm ist die Betreiberin verantwortlich: Caches, CDN etc.
in reply to XAG.info 💻📱⚙️🖥

@XAGinfo Not sharing our links is more of an expression than a literal meaning.

Can we stop people from sharing links, no, right? We don't have that power.

- Ankush

in reply to It's FOSS

If you don't want to get this traffic, stop offering up public link previews. You are the ones choosing to provide that metadata.

Someone has to pay for the bandwidth spent on distributing your link previews. You're the ones who monetise from clicks to your website- why don't you pay for it by getting better hosts?

But no, you write this rent-seeking post insisting that Mastodon instances (many of whom do this for free) should let you freeload your rich presence traffic. Shameful.

in reply to It's FOSS

in reply to It's FOSS

I've noticed that when sharing links to my own website, but I thought this was more of a me-problem with the sites performance.

Will be interesting to see how that'll pan out with the new site I'm currently building… :thaenkin:

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