Benjamin Lees <emufarmers(a)gmail.com> wrote: indication that spam bots are affecting your site's performance? If not, worrying about this is probably a waste of your time. Spambots and CPU is a known issue: https://www.google.com/search?q=spam+bots+cpu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&… Is it a problem? Yes, they're constantly trying to break in and that increases CPU usage. I dont have any analysis to prove it but I've seen many times where traffic has been normal (google analytics) but the CPU usage has gone very high. I came from a shared server where I was actually asked to leave because of the CPU usage. I've had big problems with CPU. I'm on VPS now and it can still be a problem. Average CPU usage recently went up from around 20% to 160% (multi-core, thats why it goes over 100 or some other reason) for a few hours, while Google analytics showed no change. Whether this is a malicious/ddos bot or an advertising bot, this is something that needs to be studied and dealt with. If I stay on 200% CPU usage on the VPS I may be asked to leave the server. So yes I have to keep a watch over CPU and I have to explore all possible options to keep the usage down. I'm using caching and nginx (earlier suggestions by people on this list). As to how to prevent genuine viewers from being blocked, thats problem #2 and its something that can be improved. I'll try this suggested by Henny: http://danielwebb.us/software/bot-trap/ Anne wrote: as many as 10 times on a single submission, only to give up because I simply couldn't get the captcha right. Now I don't even try to comment there. They need a better captcha. But yes, you guys have reminded me that whatever method is used, I need to make sure genuine visitors are not effected. The link by Henny might take care of it as the 'hidden' link is not seen by humans. thanks Dan On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Benjamin Lees <emufarmers(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 11:16 AM, Mark A. Hershberger <mah(a)everybody.org> wrote: I would agree with that, and add that spam fighting tools (AbuseFilter, Spam / Title blacklist, etc) are some of the highest consumers of cpu for each wikipedia edit. So too much spam protection and you'll be right back where you're at with cpu. So you definitely want to do some profiling, and make sure you're addressing the biggest issues first.

Thanks guys. addressing the biggest issues first. I havent done profiling before. I'm assuming this is the link to check out: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_debug#Profiling I will attempt to do this next time I have CPU problems. Right now we are running really well on Linode (except for that one time a few weeks ago where it went up to 160% usage). I have to again thank the people who helped me with that advice before. I'm so happy with the speed. Linode recently increased their 512MB ram package to 1GB (doubled for all packages). thanks Dan On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote: