2026-08-09 01:41 UTC
Sorry about that long-ish outage, but we were YET AGAIN getting smashed by AI bots. I have given up fighting them, and I'm just scaling up until #mastodonAU can handle the load. This time the #PostgreSQL database was running at a load of 100+ because it was disk IO bound. I did *try* to live migrate it, but it was just insanely slow so I made the call to shut it down (hence the 'Something went wrong' errors) and move it offline. It's moved. Now it's running on a pure SSD-only backing store, which hopefully will handle everything the #AI scrapers throw at us.
I'll be doing the same thing with #MastodonNZ too, shortly (but hopefully without the outage, as that's a much more lightweight instance)
I also really need to fix the status page that comes up when mau is down.
Replies (4)
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@stargazer@mastodon.nz 2026-08-09 03:05
@xrobau@mastodon.au thank you for all your work. It's very much appreciated.
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@lucky@mastodon.nz 2026-08-09 08:25
@xrobau@mastodon.au thank you for all the trouble you're going through! Will go chuck you a donation asap 😁
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@hmallett@toot.wales 2026-08-09 09:03
@xrobau@mastodon.au Is there anything you can do like rate limiting them? I’ve seen before services that work nicely for real users, but API users can destroy it in ways you wouldn’t believe.
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@joncounts@mastodon.nz 2026-08-09 09:16
@xrobau@mastodon.au Thanks Rob for everything you do to keep us afloat.