Latest post by sakinho on Thursday, 12 September 2024 15:45 EEST
Hi! While monitoring our sites I noticed that one of the uses unexpected CPU resources. I did some checking and discover that when JFilters is turn of the CPU drops a lot, to a more excpected level.
So my question is why is JFilters causing this CPU load? Can you help me figure this out?
Hi Jip
Well the answer is the obvious one. It is a heavy application. Probably the heaviest in your website.
JF queries a big part of the database, both to create the filters and get results.
May i ask how big is your project?
Kind regards,
Sakis Terzis
Founder and Lead Developer
We have one filter (on tages) on one menu item. It should filter only thew artricvles in a specific category (about 70 articles) but I just noticed after filtering also articles from other categories are listen.
So first things first If I may: How do I kae sure the fuler only shows items (with the selected tags in the filter) from a specific category?
About the load: When no one is visiting the site, this extension should not cause any load, correct?
https://www.antropos.nu/veldverkenningen
We have one filter (on tages) on one menu item. It should filter only thew artricvles in a specific category (about 70 articles) but I just noticed after filtering also articles from other categories are listen.
Can you elaborate on your setup on that? How are you restricting that to a specific category?
About the load: When no one is visiting the site, this extension should not cause any load, correct?
Yes. I don't know much about your server, but if you get high loads in a small website with no much visits, you better check if you get any bots attacking your website or if there is any cronjob running very frequently.
We have websites, with many thousands of articles and custom fields, running smoothly.
Regards,
Sakis Terzis
Founder and Lead Developer
Follow up, after inspecting your website.
If you want your tags (or any other filter) to filter a specific set of items, you need to use the Preset Filters in your JF menu item.
So, if you want to filter items from a specific category, please set that category in the "Preset Filters" setting.
Make sure that your "Category" filter is in either published or in listening state.
Kind regards,
Sakis Terzis
Founder and Lead Developer
Hi Sakinho,
I've got the category filter in the menu figured out now. Thank for helping with this.
I am still a bit woried about the CPU load this extension creates... It's not a very well visited site and it look like it's aken up a constant 40 mto 60% of the available CPU capacity for this user. But maybe thats just the how heavy this extension / filtering system is...
Regarding bots: Maybe search engines are craling the site ferquently. Do you think there is a way to prevent search engin bots to use the tag filters?
ALs o I thinks it's strange that Jooma itself does not offer somthing like tag filter on the default blog views. But But that's an differnte discusion ;-)
What are your server's specs?
Also is it a shared hosting or something like a VPN?
I am not referring to search crawlers but bots generally. Many of those with no good intentions.
Search crawlers will not spend a lot budget on a "small" website that is not updated very very frequently.
I am having my websites behind Cloudflaire, to get protected from such traffic.
A big chunk of traffic that is considered "suspicious", is being blocked by Clouflaire every day, before even reaching my server.
Kind regards,
Sakis Terzis
Founder and Lead Developer
We have a dedicated server for our clients that run about 100 sites that we have build and maintain. It's decent server with CloudLinux. This particular sites sticks out in CPU usage compared to others.
I took a quick look at the server logs and noticed a lot of entries like this:
20.171.206.127 - - [11/Sep/2024:17:24:45 +0200] "GET /veldverkenningen/filter?onderwerpen[0]=36&onderwerpen[2]=17&onderwerpen[3]=26&onderwerpen[4]=20&onderwerpen[5]=28&onderwerpen[6]=33&onderwerpen[7]=40 HTTP/1.1" 200 11028 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)"
I blocked the IP range 20.171.206. and the CPU load went down a lot.
I think I need to ask our server company to help us figure out if and how we can stop this behaviour. Becauze I don;t think blocking IP's is the beste way to do it. But a least now I know where to look.
Thanks so far!
Fine!
That's a preventive measure. It is quite common issue for the websites to get requests by a hords of bots.
Btw. Given the amount of content and filters you have, i don't think that JF is heavy at all.
It just gives a way to select multiple links/values from the filters, which can increase the surface of attack.
I am closing the ticket.
If you have any other question/issue, feel free to open a new ticket.
Kind regards,
Sakis Terzis
Founder and Lead Developer