Problems Accessing the ECF Grading Database?

General discussions about ratings.
Jon Griffith
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Re: Problems Accessing the ECF Grading Database?

Post by Jon Griffith » Sun Jul 05, 2015 5:46 pm

The grading website suffered crashes in January, May and June, with a total downtime of 20 hours. These failures have been due to excessive peaks in page requests. Our normal load is under 10,000 pages per day. In January an infected computer (not ours) demanded 80,000 pages. In late May an unknown robot was demanding 100,000 pages per day, with a peak of over160,000 pages. In June our shared web-host was also attacked. In response we have taken three measures:
  • Block the attackers. This is helpful to recover from a crash, but it cannot prevent the next one.
  • Serve pages faster. The Games-List and Cross-Table pages were withdrawn because they take time searching through the 2 million games in the database.
  • Abolish links. Robots and Search engines collect data by following every link. The grading tables had several links per row, and many rows per page.
The revised Grading Website went live on 25th June. It appears unchanged, but users may have noticed different behaviours. Every link has been replaced by highlighted text which looks and works the same, but is in fact a button. In the former site, each link loaded a sub-page into an iframe. Now, each button loads html text into the main page by ajax. Various features of the old site were impaired by the change, and are being restored gradually: tables can again be sorted by clicking on column headings; and wild-cards again work in the search-box; Zoom will be next.

Game-Lists and congress Cross-Tables have been restored in a moderated form. Time will tell if the new site is more resistant to attacks. Thus far there seem to be fewer page load errors.

A few ingenious users had found that they could load the old sub-pages by URL. This unintended exploit is no longer possible. However, a similar output could be accessed by inspecting the function of the "Bookmark" button, which is found in the menu below the ECF logo.
Jon Griffith
Yorkshire Grader

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