Positive Fusion

We’re still having rapid unflux of these two search bots causing abnormal increases in overall server load. In addition to these ill-behaved search bots, Google is also indexing in a frenzy as well (which rarely poses any sort of problem).

Inktomi / Yahoo appears to again have unleashed an army of search bots. This is very similar to many months ago how Microsoft sent out an army of search bots. These bots are acting rather maliciously, in that there is no pause between page requests and we have encountered at least 80 of them requesting pages at the same time. This is, in effect, as though Inktomi is slashdotting the server.

This has, as it did yesterday early morning, created a situation of increased load on the server. While no services have failed as a result, page loading times have typically increased.

The server load is highly above normal this morning. It appears that a search bot (inktomi) is running rampant, far beyond normal timings, fetching cpu intensive pages in rapid succession. The Apache process failed and automatically restarted once the load average hit approximately 50. We are working to bring this under control; however, this ‘attack’ is still underway.

We have again corrected an issue with a Cpanel forced update of the Perl DBI Module. We hope to have disabled this automated update to prevent further problems; however if you do encounter an issue with your Perl script interfacing with MySQL please be patient as we are working to correct this intermittent problem. We appreciate your understanding.

Lastnight perl’s DBI module auto-updated to version 1.49. This caused problems with some scripts utilizing the module due to reasons unknown at this time. In the interim, until the true cause can be determined we have backed down the version to 1.48. This appears to have corrected the problem. If you continue to encounter difficulties relating to perl’s DBI module please contact support through normal channels.