As we said yesterday, we found out the reason the site was so slow last weekend, and some parts of Monday.
And the reason was that we got kindly hammered by some proxy servers that seem to be located in Vietnam,
requesting lots of “fake”, as in “non existing” pages, always referring to the same user (that was already banned, don’t know when).

These strange requests were referred to this user’s blog, but they were totally fake, containing unusually long paths and as far as we know, they always resulted in the “banned user” page (or timeouts/proxy errors).

When we found this, we just temporarily disallowed requests having that strange pattern, and, voila’, everything was working again.
They could be denial of service attacks (?), or just fake traffic thrown at us for some reason… who knows?

Anyway, we’re at work now to implement a “throttling” mechanism

The Ring Two film , that will hopefully help stopping these strange guys from harming the site while improving overall stability of MyOpera. We’re growing up… :)

Starman full