but as I understand it, it's basically a database volume request thing. Every page served on the forum is a dynamic database request, and if you have thousands, or even tens of thousands of requests it can handle that.
I've been fighting these exact problems like everyone else for the past year on my own forum.
But it turned out for me is it was not actually database hits causing the slowdowns at all, but PHP-FPM itself. I optimised everything to Hell and back on my server. Basically only brought a couple of weeks grace at best. Rinse and repeat over two years.. You end up fighting a battle you simply cannot win
Long story short, I did a hard IP block on basically bad traffic areas like the Middle East, where we have never once seen good traffic on the forum.
Secondly, I had to build various PHPBB3 extensions to completely rewire how PHPBB3 handles website traffic. I basically did a copy of every thread on the forum to a nginx cache which is held in RAM. And around 80% of legitimate traffic now hit the cache. It may sound simple but believe me it wasn't , as I was fighting various issues with the forum every step of the way.
Furthermore I set up a double pool for resources where "guests" get a 80% share, and members 20%. Basically what this means its members always get their own resource pool and even if the site looks to go down for guests, the members are completely unaware of that even happening as they are in their own pool. Members are then informed to always stay logged in to make sure they never lose access.
I basically spent an entire year trying to block the traffic and even wrote a roundup if anyone is interested..
https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/articles/traffic-floods-2026.htmlhttps://www.exxosforum.co.uk/articles/server_security_2026.htmlTL;DR
Trying to block the traffic, you are fighting a losing battle. Believe me I tried incredibly hard for the best part of two years doing exactly that.
The main problem is mobile devices which rotate the IP addresses every few seconds, one moment you have legitimate traffic from a single IP address of then the next few seconds a flood of crap, and then you get rotated back to a genuine user again. It's a conundrum because you have to block the bad traffic, but then everyone mobile IP becomes collateral damage and cannot access the server because the IP ranges now banned.
Cloudflare.. I'm never going to try that. I wrote probably hundreds of posts over the past few years how my home address gets blocked by them, my server struggles to download updates and such because cloudflare block them. Even external and other related services or websites end up blocked. And the kicker, I even get floods of traffic from cloudflares own network!! So my philosophy there is, if they cannot even protect their own network, how are they going to protect anyone else's ? I'm not looking to start arguments with people with this but for me personally Cloudflare has caused enough problems for me to never consider it. Plus I would much rather have my defences hosted on my own network so if there is a problem I can solve it myself the same day not depend on the third-party company technical support which is generally non-existent anyway these days. I also got told by several "cyber security experts" to use Cloudflare. They simply could not comprehend they was blocking legitimate services which are critical infrastructure for my server.
So the answer is not to block traffic, but to basically "make it cost nothing" . Unfortunately as I found, there is no prebuilt solution for these things and you have to build your own solution from the ground up. PHPBB3 I had to write many extensions and custom nginx integrations which are all done to solve the problems. Plus you need enough RAM to hold copies of the entire forum which presents its own problems but they can at least be compressed. The solution I put together was far from simple but it's unfortunately what you have to do in 2026.
No doubt this post will make a lot of people angry, as a general rule I never post on other forums anymore because of the hatred and abuse I get over basically everything I say and do. But after continuously reading problems one of my favourite channels, motivated me to list post what works for me.. At least for the moment anyway.. I hope it gives you some food for thought anyway Dave..
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