[adwade]

Originally Posted by adwade

That's what I thought at first, but ALL these requests came from a single IP-Address. Upon checking with the user further (a woman cyclist on our board for years), she had no knowledge or any indication the event had occurred.

[s]My guess is, our HOST has probably changed something to do with MySQL (as others mentioned above) and perhaps that tripped this product into going into a repetitive update cycle for whatever reason(s).[/s]

In doing some more research, I don't think it was anything our HOST has done. Our problem, stemmed from a single (good/reliable) user on our website. Below is a listing of when they access our website and how many requests were made of the site, per the raw access logs:

01FEB 281 requests made from 03:15 to 21:59
02FEB 778 requests made from 00:59 to 23:18
03FEB 292 requests made from 13:44 to 22:12
05FEB 438 requests made from 02:00 to 23:19
07FEB 663 requests made from 00:08 to 23:52
08FEB 53 requests made from 11:31 to 15:08
09FEB 281 requests made from 03:16 to 21:00
10FEB 435 requests made from 00:01 to 23:19
11FEB 196 requests made from 03:22 to 05:22
12FEB 50583 requests made from 00:33 to 08:36
13FEB 249 requests made from 07:19 to 08:46
14FEB 19059 requests made from 19:00 to 23:57
15FEB 12115 requests made from 00:13 to 23:56
17FEB 171 requests made from 04:30 to 04:43
18FEB 2097 requests made from 00:05 to 23:45
19FEB 134 requests made from 09:33 to 09:34
20FEB 59174 requests made from 01:21 to 14:46
Our account suspended by HOST
21FEB 11048 requests made from 00:51 to 13:13
22FEB 308875 requests made from 01:18 to 23:59
Our account suspended by HOST
23FEB 278 requests made from 00:00 to 07:11
24FEB 331 requests made from 00:37 to 23:56
25FEB 1 request made at 06:31am
26FEB 11875 requests made from 00:24 to 23:59
27FEB 8641 requests made from 00:00 00:27
28FEB 146 requests made from 1:14 to 03:53
01MAR 9180 requests made from 00:49 to 07:13
02MAR 398 requests made from 1:12 to 11:40
03MAR 1 request made at 00:38am
06MAR 444 requests made from 00:21 to 01:32

At the worst, our HOST wrote us saying: "High resource usage, especially with PHP scripts" (i.e. misc.php, which this MOD calls for stats calculations) and "Sometimes it has spiked to 35-40% of the CPU."

The user causing this problem, was using MS-IE (Version 8.0.7600.16385) to access our website and was the only one having this issue. They also had a Macintosh computer in the household and when using it, the issue was not present. This week (i.e. 02MAR), they installed the Google Chrome Browser, and have not caused any server load issues since employing it.

Personally, I set our NIX Server Load Limit (in AdminCP) to 10, and also revised the "How often users can manually refresh Latest Posts (in seconds)" to 300. I took both these actions, in an attempt to help reduce our server load during heavy usage times and avoid getting our account suspended again by our HOST.

Again, briefly the problem was the continual reloading of our main forum page that show the stats boxes, causing them to be re-calculated continuously....(below is just 1 second of our raw access log)

xxx.xxx.158.49 - - [12/Feb/2011:08:21:33 -0500] "POST /forums/misc.php?show=newestmembers&resultsnr=5 HTTP/1.1" 200 2920 "http://www.website.com/forums/index.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.6; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C)"
xxx.xxx.158.49 - - [12/Feb/2011:08:21:33 -0500] "POST /forums/misc.php?show=mostviewedthreads&resultsnr=5 HTTP/1.1" 200 2617 "http://www.website.com/forums/index.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.6; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C)"
xxx.xxx.158.49 - - [12/Feb/2011:08:21:33 -0500] "POST /forums/misc.php?show=latestposts&resultsnr=5 HTTP/1.1" 200 14240 "http://www.website.com/forums/index.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.6; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C)"
xxx.xxx.158.49 - - [12/Feb/2011:08:21:33 -0500] "POST /forums/misc.php?show=newestmembers&resultsnr=5 HTTP/1.1" 200 2920 "http://www.website.com/forums/index.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.6; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C)"
xxx.xxx.158.49 - - [12/Feb/2011:08:21:33 -0500] "POST /forums/misc.php?show=latestposts&resultsnr=5 HTTP/1.1" 200 14240 "http://www.website.com/forums/index.php" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.6; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C)"

It would be nice if this MOD could cache the last results of the stats calculation, and then if requested to re-calc them again too soon (i.e. upon multiple reloading of a webpage) it would just display such rather than having to re-calculate them all over again.

Not that any of this solves the actual issue which caused the problem (i.e. still unknown), but it might help to shed some more light on what's happening to some other administrators employing this MOD. Meanwhile, FWIW our Server Load Averages are back down to normal (i.e. 2.77 3.15 3.20) after our single problem user quit using MS-IE v8.