Bandwidth usage

[skater]

Hi, all. I got hit with a bill from the website provider for excessive bandwidth usage.

I don't think it's anything anyone is doing specifically on B190.com that's causing it, but I've implemented file size limits in both posts and the gallery: 5 megabytes. Please please please try to keep your pictures smaller than that - reduce quality or size, etc.

I'm investigating the jump in usage, but it's pretty wild - up through December 16, the website used 10-15 gb/day. Then on the 17th, it jumped to over 70 gb/day, and it didn't fall below 80 gb for the rest of the month. In fact it has already used a ton of this month's allocation. See the graph below.

December bandwiddth usage.png

My guess is bots are coming in and slurping everything up, probably for AI purposes. Larger pictures mean more bandwidth usage. This wasn't an issue before with a low traffic site, but something has changed to suddenly pull a bunch more hits on the site.

[skater]

Oh, I found it. The bots are sucking down all of the attachments (images attached to messages, not the gallery). I've now made it so that you have to be logged in to see the images.

Sorry, everyone. Not what I wanted to do. But I can't spend several hundred dollars a month to make some AI bots happy.

[Mlong]

It's probably me just checking to see if anyone want to buy my B190.

[skater]

It's probably me just checking to see if anyone want to buy my B190.

LOL definitely not, AI bots - in particular OpenAI's ChatGPT, were slamming the site.

I now have a reverse proxy set up and hopefully we won't have any more problems.

Sorry I had to pull the site while you're trying to sell.

[Mlong]

No, problem. I am glad you were able to figure all that out. It is a foreign language to me.