Hacker News Administrator Explains Recent Downtime: Overloaded After Relaxing Anti-Crawler Protections
By
uyzstvqs
Pure flour-power. Hearty enough to carry you through lunch.
Summary
Hacker News experienced downtime due to being overloaded after the site administrator relaxed anti-crawler protections too much, which inadvertently allowed excessive traffic. The administrator was alerted by PagerDuty at 5:24am but mistakenly thought the issue was resolved and went back to sleep, leaving the problem unresolved. The administrator acknowledges the mistake and explains the trade-off between blocking legitimate users and preventing crawler overload.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWe're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.
The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users.
However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.
PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
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