SQL error

[Breelander]

The site seems generally a little slow today, and several times has failed to load a page, showing this error instead:

General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User voify0z_6dyf already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

[Itsallaguess]

The site seems generally a little slow today, and several times has failed to load a page, showing this error instead:

General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User voify0z_6dyf already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

I tend to take a quick look at the number of users accessing the site when there's slow-down issues like the ones we're experiencing today, and taking a look now, we can see there's around 1500 users 'accessing' the site -



Source - https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/index.php

Normal-running for this time of day would be around the 300-400 users mark, where slow-down issues aren't generally seen, so this might lend it's weight behind my long-term view that the site is often being targetted by bot-accounts, and when it does so, it tends to severely affect performance of the site to normal users.

I've raised this issue with Stooz a number of times, most recently on the link below -

https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=43968&start=40#p715279

I'm sorry to say that Stooz has not even acknowledged a number of posts on this specific issue, so I've given up raising it with him or reporting the problem.

In performance-related posts that Stooz has made separately, he's mentioned moving the site to a different provider, presumably with better-performing servers, but I think there are two issues here - any normal performance issues that might be experienced with a 'normal' number of users, which may well warrant investigation of alternative providers, and 'abnormal' performance issues where user-numbers are seen to be ultra-high, and where suspected bot-related activity *can* be mitigated by the site-admin team by utilising some of the tools and processes linked in the above post, and I think it's a real shame that Stooz seems to be conflating the two issues and deciding that the only solution deemed to be suitable is a change of provider, when clearly that's not necessarily the case where other phpbb site owners are seen to have had some success in limiting bot-user issues without necessarily needing to change provider...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[MrFoolish]

Probably a bit off-topic, but how do advertisers know how many people visit a site? How would they know how many are real people and how many are bots?

[Oswulf]

Pretty sure the problem isn't the number of users accessing the site. Even at 2 a.m. in the morning, UK time, I've been unable to get into the site.

My guess is that there's a program issue, and database connections are not being closed, leading to a buildup of such connections until the permitted threshold is passed.

It's a problem and a pain.

[Itsallaguess]

Pretty sure the problem isn't the number of users accessing the site. Even at 2 a.m. in the morning, UK time, I've been unable to get into the site.

I think the 'complete outage' of the site over recent days was a different problem to the regular 'slow-down' issues seen when 'user-numbers' rise considerably.

Even when it's been very slow, site access has been able to be achieved, but over the last couple of days the Lemon Fool URL has not been accessible at all, and so I think that's been a separate and specific issue which thankfully looks to have been resolved this morning.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Breelander]

Pretty sure the problem isn't the number of users accessing the site. Even at 2 a.m. in the morning, UK time, I've been unable to get into the site.

I think the 'complete outage' of the site over recent days was a different problem to the regular 'slow-down' issues seen when 'user-numbers' rise considerably.

Even when it's been very slow, site access has been able to be achieved, but over the last couple of days the Lemon Fool URL has not been accessible at all, and so I think that's been a separate and specific issue which thankfully looks to have been resolved this morning.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Not entirely out of the woods yet. The site is still slow, and subject to random errors. In particular, one of the more consistent ones is the AJAX ERROR on clicking 'Mark topics read' in a forum.

These may be teething troubles due to moving to a new supplier:

Apologies all, the site hosting has been broken this bank holiday (Early May).
We have been working all weekend to try and resolve it and given up the will. We are moving the site to a new supplier instead.
This means a bunch more pain while I transfer the setup over but hopefully for the better.

viewtopic.php?f=101&t=46805

[Breelander]

Got another one today on the new supplier.

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User voify0z_6dyf already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

[dave559]

I'm pretty sure that these high "guest" visitor counts (1500+, at the time I am writing this), and corresponding high numbers of database connections, are almost entirely due to badly-behaved web bots (bots of the type that try to search and index, or maliciously probe, websites, rather than those trying to create accounts to post spam, although there will be some of those).

Part of my job involves tending to web servers, and it is has been very noticeable that there has been a massive increase in badly-behaved web bots absolutely hammering web servers with constant requests (rather than limiting and spacing them out to an acceptable background level), over the past couple of years, including some identified as being from supposedly large and 'professional' well-known companies (often including many of those selling the "so-called AI" snakeoil - well, it sure ain't that intelligent!), but clearly with either incredibly badly written bot code, or a "just don't care" attitude, or both.

I've taken to adding webserver rules to just immediately return "403 Forbidden" for bad bots that I can identify, so that they can't take up DB or other processing resources, but even this still results in some extra load on the server, albeit much less than just allowing their requests to be processed normally.

It would probably be worthwhile trying something similar (if your hosting account allows you access to the appropriate parts of the webserver config), or asking the host if they can help, or seeing if there are phpBB modules that could maybe help with that specific problem?

It might also be worth turning off the visitor count display in phpBB, if that can be done, as it's going to result in some server load just doing the calculations to generate that, especially if being hammered by bots at the time/all the time?

[moorfield]

Yes regularly seeing the MySQL error now.

Perhaps the site admins can give us techies some more colour to the announcement on what happened at the weekend, and some reassurance that no account data has been compromised or stolen along the way? (I assume that is an encrypted DB user account we are seeing... )

Many thanks.

[Breelander]

Now getting the SQL error about once every 3 or 4 attempt to change to another page.

WHO IS ONLINE
In total there are 1542 users online :: 8 registered, 9 hidden and 1525 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[XFool]

Very common now:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User voify0z_6dyf already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

Who or what is "User voify0z_6dyf" and what are they doing? Not listed as a Member of TLF.


Interesting: viewtopic.php?p=84673#p84673

[dave559]

It is the username that the site has on the hosting system's database server, to allow the site backend systems to actually query and update its database (where the forum forum-structure, user details, posts, etc, are stored).

It has nothing directly to do with any usernames of users of the forum (which will be stored as records in a table within the forum database that is accessible to that backend system account).

[Breelander]

The site is near-unusable at present. Every 3rd or 4th attempt to read any page errors out. It took me several attempts to get to this thread, the last error was:

Information
No route found for "GET /viewtopic.php"

And we've just hit a new all time record for visitors (almost all bots).

WHO IS ONLINE
In total there are 3328 users online :: 2 registered, 1 hidden and 3325 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 3335 on May 12th, 2025, 3:32 am

It even errored out on trying to post this, fingers crossed 2nd time round....

Information
No route found for "GET /posting.php"

Third time lucky?

[Itsallaguess]

The site is near-unusable at present. Every 3rd or 4th attempt to read any page errors out. It took me several attempts to get to this thread, the last error was:

Information
No route found for "GET /viewtopic.php"

And we've just hit a new all time record for visitors (almost all bots).

WHO IS ONLINE
In total there are 3328 users online :: 2 registered, 1 hidden and 3325 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 3335 on May 12th, 2025, 3:32 am

That online-user record was broken 10 minutes later this morning -



I suspect that until Stooz puts steps in place to firmly deal with the huge numbers of AI bots killing this site's bandwidth, that the board is likely to stay in the unusable state that we currently find ourselves.

There are huge numbers of recent threads on the PHPBB forum discussing this very issue, with lots of helpful tips being given from PHPBB site owners that have suffered with exactly the same issues.

I've linked to some before to try and help Stooz be aware that there are solutions, but unfortunately we've yet to even receive an acknowledgement that he's reading those posts.

Again, I'll link here to a couple of recent PHPBB forum threads discussing this problem -

What is going on? Is this some kind of widespread attack? (May 2025) -

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2662519


Re: HIGH GUEST NUMBERS (April 2025) -

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=16063945#p16063945

To be clear - the PHPBB forum linked above contains threads with clear instructions and solutions to this issue that have been verified to work by site owners that have previously been plagued with the same issues affecting Lemon Fool over recent months, where site owners who have implemented some of the solutions discussed have gone on to say that their site has then been able to return to a normal usable state.

There are solutions to this problem...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Itsallaguess]

‎
And currently the site seems to be working well, with speedy responses.

Unsurprisingly, the current online user numbers seem to be what I'd call 'normal', compared to the bot-hammering numbers seen above -



Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[moorfield]

Finding it still very hit and miss, and not seen any further updates particularly whether any account data has been compromised or stolen along the way, which is my concern. The last few months has got me thinking about passwords (my Proton thread) and this week how much information folk "leak" about themselves and their personal finances here over the years. My own experiments with ChatGPT etc. show that is now quite a trivial exercise to read an individual's entire history here and start "mining" it. The apparent increase in "bots" could be doing that, and much more.

Worth taking a moment to reflect on what you share here. And maybe change your username to not embed your DOB in it (you know who you are!).

[csearle]

My gut feeling is that our stooz and his, er, team are hard working individuals, who only have spare time over weekends, sometimes, to devote time to rejigging TLF. So, if my suspicions are accurate the site will be whatever it is during the week and suffer disruptions mainly at the weekends.

This is just speculation on my part. I feel quite sanguine about it. No doubt they are doing their best and will eventually reach a good point for us all. This process may be sped up if they tap into some of the posts made on the site suggesting possible issues. Between us we have quite a strength in depth (to coin a footballing phrase). C.

[Itsallaguess]

‎
It seems like the site is almost unusable again.

A short while ago we had a new record of 'users online', with 3625 'Guest' bot-accounts active at one point -



It definitely feels like the brief periods where the site has actually been usable recently is purely down to the bots taking a short rest in their wrecking activities...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[moorfield]

‎
It seems like the site is almost unusable again.

A short while ago we had a new record of 'users online', with 3625 'Guest' bot-accounts active at one point -

Sadly yes, and that number has increased again this morning...

[Gerry557]

Logged in this morning and opened tabs of the new posts. Nearly every one had the sql issue. Keep refreshing eventually gets you in.