Site Instability
Published at 21:12 on 7 June 2025
The robots are back, and crawling the hell out of my Mercurial repository that really can’t take that sort of rate of access. So this site has been more down than up recently.
robots.txt has been adjusted accordingly, but the offending robots are apparently working on cached data and still making banned requests. So I have temporarily turned Web access to the repository off. The requests continue, but now they get relatively cheap 404 responses involving only Apache, instead of having to fork and exec a Python CGI script to process each request, so they are no longer doing much harm.
When the robots stop trying to access that CGI script (probably in a day or so), I will re-enable Web access.