I’ve been getting a lot of these messages lately:
SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data
So I decided to look at the network requests in the browser console. After all, what JSON data was it trying and failing to parse?
Well, turns out that it was pretty much always:
Timeout occurred while waiting for a slot to become available
I don’t do a lot of backend work, but I suspect that the lack of slots might be referring to the server running out of resources to process all of the ongoing user activity concurrently. Could we be running into scaling issues?
A lot of bots were spamming the instance which was causing an IO bottleneck, and thus timeout issues. We’re looking into solutions to limit their impact, such as rate-limiting users. We’re trying to do it in such a way that it doesn’t impact regular users which is why it’s taking a bit longer.
Awesome, thanks for the update. You guys rock.
Does this instance have a bot problem?
Not in the sense of the other servers that were overtaken by botswarms. But there have been a handful of bots recently.
It’s hard to get a bot onto this instance, but not impossible. Once they’re on here, they can spam out nonsense as fast as the server can take it (hence the rate-limiting solution).
Yea, rate-limiting per user instead of per IP might be a bit more complicated.
Appreciate the work y’all put into this.
You guys seem to handle fine, but if you need to toss a few ideas at a network engineer, ping me.
Thank you!