I found out what the main problem is that kept causing my server to reboot. Unreal.
Many of you are probably aware that the S&F site was having performance issues, beginning last week, causing it to sporadically become unresponsive. This was a first. Our server admin had maintenance work to perform on the server and it looked like those maintenance tasks were slowing the site down, which is completely normal and the server was due for that. But that turned out to not be the issue. The issue is that TikTok is bombarding the site with an enormous amount of connections. TikTok. What the heck?! I’ll paste a quote from my server admin:
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I have checked over your server and I see a massive amount of traffic incoming to screamandfly.com. I looked and today alone over 300,000 requests have been made to this site and the amount of connections is causing Apache to crash. I can raise the Apache limits but that would enable the abuse to increase as well. The traffic is mainly coming from Bytespider, which is the crawler bot for TikTok.
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Web crawlers are bots that index websites for things like searching, etc. All search engines have them and they’re necessary for making sure when people perform a search on Google or another web search service that it finds relevant results. But why the heck is TikTok slamming this site (and others) with so many connection? The S&F server would get overloaded with requests and as a safety measure it would reboot. That’s the primary cause of the site not loading sometimes, beginning last week. I had no idea TikTok uses crawlers like that, and I’m such a flagrantly abusive manner.
I’ll update a little later. It’s going to be a long night :nonod: