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Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal f...
pod.geraspora.deExcerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angry.
In the last 60 days, the diaspora* web assets received 11.3 million requests. That equals to 2.19 req/s - which honestly isn't that much. I mean, it's more than your average personal blog, but nothing that my infrastructure shouldn't be able to handle.
However, here's what's grinding my fucking gears. Looking at the top user agent statistics, there are the leaders:
2.78 million requests - or 24.6% of all traffic - is coming from Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot).
1.69 million reuqests - 14.9% - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonb...
I mean, scraping bots would obviously obey robots.txt so those scraping - bots, i mean users can’t be bots
Right? We have standards for this and the reasonable assumption is that if it doesn’t respect robots.txt and otherwise looks like a user then it’s a user. It can’t be the responsibility of every single server admin to perfectly recognize what’s a user and what’s a bot run by a billion-dollar company doing a decent job pretending to be a user.