IMO this is going too far off topic, but I won't accept this being posted without me answering and defending myself. If a mod wants to delete this I hereby ask him to delete this whole conversation and not just this post.
Let me clear some obvious mispredictions you have:
Then please let me also clear some obvious mispredictions you have.
-amount of traffic is not of great importance, server load is.
OK, so you tell me that there is a way of generating a massive serverload without generating any traffic by calling a profile site? This does not make the server calculate anything, the only "load" that is produced is the read activity on the harddrive where the database is. I can not say how much data is read everytime someone opens a profile site, but as all information that is read from the harddrive is then sent to the client asking for that data, the traffic that is created is a pretty good indicator about what serverload has been produced by this request. I never said that the amount of traffic is a great importance, I thought you were intelligent enough to conclude that if not much data is sent there cant be much data that was read. I don't know why you bring up a search function as an example, this only shows me that you are not able to draw that concludion yourself, so let me try again: Of course, a search function creates an extremely high serverload but only a little bit of traffic as only a little part of the data read is being sent. But noone used anything like a search function. When you open a user's page, some information about that user has to be read (like name, posts, age, etc.) but this time all of the information that was read is sent to the user requesting the page and thereby can be measured by measuring the traffic that is being sent.
-You don't know if this forum had no problem providing it's content to 260 people, you weren't there. And It seems just a little bit off charts anyway.
How do you know that I was not there? And even if I was not there: searching for "forum lag" in this forum does not return any results that indicate that this forum ever had any problems serving its content, so you can conclude that it did fine.
-I didn't at first knew it was slow and fast changing often, so I blame you
Is it my fault if you don't know the circumstances? Why do you say that this is a misprediction of mine? [rhetorical question, do not answer!]
but this doesn't rule out DOS attack.
Yes, it doesn't rule it out, but it is pretty different from what you would expect from a constant high server load, which a DOS attack typically produces. A more typical sign would be high response time or no response at all, but continuously at all the time and not just from time to time for a few minutes. The time where the forum worked in between the lags indicated that there was no high load - otherwise it would have also lagged at these moments.
Let me point to you: If this server has no problem serving 26 people at the moment, It doesn't mean it won't they all were clicking every single second. Especially if they were all searching every second, right? So all your points are just not considered well. You were especially loading big chunks of database, that's why I blamed you. There was no way I could possibly know if your bot was working at the time (But it seemed quite possible if just few moments ago you were speaking on forum), nor was I sure how it works. Does now it become obvious to you why I blamed you?
I know that when 26 people are online it does not mean that 26 people load a user profile every second, but I think that loading one thread creates a much higher server load because much more content has to be read out of the database. So when 260 people are online and at least half of them use the forum while being online this should result in a much bigger read activity on the servers hard drives.
I was NOT loading big chunks out of the database, why do you think that? Have you ever seen a user profile page? For most of the profiles no more than 1000 chars = 1Kb has to be read. For every thread you load more than this amount * 10 of data has to be read in order to send all posts to the client. So I think if just one person is searching something particular and just rapidly going through the threads and then quickly loads the next site of a big thread, it produces more server load than when one person loads one user profile per second. I'm not talking about one thread being read by hundreds of users and thereby being cached one time and then only being read out of the cache, im talking about one person randomly going through old threads that are not cached because they are not needed often.
Most of the indicators you thought you had against me are only uncertain or even wrong things and from these uncertain indicators you drew a wrong conclusion and even officially said that the forum lags were my fault. You did not even say that this was just a conclusion of yours, you said it like it was a fact. Afterwards, after jitspoe told everyone the real reason, you didn't even apologize. Now you want me to understand why you concluded this. Well, I understand it. Probably, I would have drawn the same conclusion if I were you. But I would definitely not have wrongly accused someone in an official forum while not having more than indicators. I would have simply asked the user:
Did you know the forum is lagging right now? I think that this might be due to your program, could you please stop it so we can see if it's your program? Searching for bots is a good thing but the forum has to stay accessible all the time.
You didn't write something like that, you didn't even try to be nice. Instead, you said - just to repeat it:
xrichardx you are right now blocking forum access with your bot. Congratulations on being stupid.
EDIT: Jitspoe has already been informed, no need to notify him.
Edit after payl's following post: You know what? That's exactly the payl everyone in this forum knows and complains about. Being a part of and helping a community / an open source project / a nonprofit project is a nice thing and everyone appreciates that, but in order to really help and to make people like you, you will have to be nice to them. I think that this is one big point you don't get. The less you are nice, the less the people will actually care about what you say. I'm not whining. I by now give a excrement about what you say. I know that you do not get what I want to tell you - or at least behave like you don't and that you will only tell me and are only telling me not to whine. And by doing that, you are showing everyone 1. that you are out of arguments and 2. what an antisocial *** you can be.
I don't want this to become a discussion about personal things and I won't answer to any replies on this, but please just think about what you post and what effect this might have on the user you are addressing in your post.
