Is PPM Forums faster for you now?

Banshee

Hello everyone! I've been recently working on some code optimizations for the PPM forums in order to ensure a better forum experience for all of us. Hopefully, things should run smoother from now on. If you experience any weird behavior, beware that it might only be temporary. But as far as I've checked, things should work fine for now.

Anderwin · General **Joined**: 16 May 2005

Damn a lot faster now!

_________________
Can you hide from me Wink

?

Banshee · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 12:06 am Post subject:

I figured what was the forum software's weakest point in terms of performance and fixed it Wink

.

PPM used to be in the top 2 resource hogs of this server. Now it is MigEater (1st place) and Revora forums (2nd place). By the way, the fact of MigEater's site be first place is something really odd. I'll investigate it too.

Mig Eater · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 3:13 am Post subject:

Well its nice to be first for something XD but that's weird, I guess I do have thousands of unit screen shots on the D-day site tho...

I did have an issue a few months ago that someone or something edited the htaccess file blocking all traffic to the site, maybe there is something more nefarious going on :/

_________________

Banshee · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 4:06 am Post subject:

PPM, your site and Fallout Studios have been the target of Denial of Service attacks for some months already. The .htaccess edit was a way to reduce the damage.

Mig Eater · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 4:27 am Post subject:

Ah I wasn't aware, that's fine but it seemed to block everyone tho so I had to remove the changes.

_________________

Banshee · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 4:40 am Post subject:

It blocked a bunch of toxic servers. Those were no human users.

MadHQ · Commander **Joined**: 07 Nov 2003

LOL, congrats on being number 1 MigEater.

LOL, I am glad its not me.

TBH, I am surprised to see Revora at number 2, I didnt know people went there anymore...

But I will say the forms have been very slow, but it seems like it has improved, hopefully it will get better.

_________________
MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

G-E · Defense Minister **Joined**: 09 Feb 2015

Oddly there's a longer delay before the page load begins, and then the loading itself is much faster after. Or this is how it feels anecdotally, previously long request times may have been masked by the slower incremental loading.

_________________
http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai

MadHQ · Commander **Joined**: 07 Nov 2003

Well, now it seems slow...

_________________
MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

Banshee · Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2025 11:18 pm Post subject:

It was slow for me during the weekend. It is faster again now.

But even in the slow times, the resource use of PPM in the server was a way lower than what it used to be. I don't know what was the cause of the last slow down. If it is PPM's fault or not.

MadHQ · Commander **Joined**: 07 Nov 2003

Ya, Its seems pretty slow again.

_________________
MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

Banshee · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2025 7:35 pm Post subject:

There are moments that get slower, but overall it is faster. Even when the forum gets spammed, the spam is far more aggressive now.

Medalmonkey · Jumpjet Infantry **Joined**: 26 Nov 2003

Maybe its a little quicker, but honestly can't tell.

MadHQ wrote:

TBH, I am surprised to see Revora at number 2, I didnt know people went there anymore...

SAME, I havent been to Revora in at least 10 years.
Old forums are fun to surf. Its like a blast from the past. Recently I've been scrolling an old Diablo 2 modding forum the early 2000's... Laughing

_________________

Mig Eater · Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2025 9:26 am Post subject:

The forum keeps switching from lighting fast on some days to taking several minutes to load on others :/

But yeah overall its loading much faster now tho Smile

_________________

MadHQ · Commander **Joined**: 07 Nov 2003

Is it hardware related? Didn't PPM have the same issue years ago, and it ended up being hardware failure?

_________________
MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

Banshee · Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2025 3:37 pm Post subject:

The problem that I have fixed was software related. The remaining lagging times can be hardware related (this same server hosts other sites, and they may occasionally receive a denial of service). Or PPM itself can be a direct victim of it, which happened on some occasions.

MadHQ · Commander **Joined**: 07 Nov 2003

Really quite slow today.

Maybe its like what was happening to my FTP connection not working?

IPv6 IP vs IPv4 IP?

_________________
MadHQ's Graveyard - Click here!
(Permissions) - (F.A.Q.)

wow4ik81 · Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2026 3:01 pm Post subject:

It's very slow for me too, but on some days it's very fast.

Pandaprewmaster325 · Soldier **Joined**: 14 May 2025 **Location**: Syria

Yeah it's noticeably faster

_________________
SQUARE ENIX REMAKE FINAL FANTASY 2

Nero7O · Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2026 12:27 pm Post subject:

Sometimes fast, sometimes almost not usable at all with endless loading times.

Banshee · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 2:49 am Post subject:

The amount of bots overloading this place has been quite massive recently. I'll implement another strategy against denial of service attempts here very soon. I'm already planning the new solution.

G-E · Defense Minister **Joined**: 09 Feb 2015

The service availability has improved a lot today over last week.

_________________
http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai

Anderwin · General **Joined**: 16 May 2005

Really slow now, even hard to load pages... Sad

_________________
Can you hide from me Wink

?

Banshee · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2026 5:23 pm Post subject:

I was having a hard time to make my new anti-DDoS strategy to work at the time you were complaining. I'm still testing. At least it is not causing error 500 anymore.

Banshee · Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2026 3:01 am Post subject:

Update: The stage 1 of our new automatic anti-flood system has been running for a couple of hours. It is definitely not immune to DDoS but it is being successful at toning them down a bit, allowing the forums to be browsable. But it is not fast yet. I'm still calibrating it.

wow4ik81 · Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2026 11:52 am Post subject:

I'm not an expert when it comes to website security, but my question is: would it make sense to lock the site and only allow access with a username and password?

Banshee · Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2026 1:11 pm Post subject:

Nope. It does not make sense. People will eventually log out or use the site in a device for the first time and they need to login.

The most visited section here during DDoS is the index.

Banshee · Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2026 9:31 pm Post subject:

Update: The second stage has been set in motion. It is a far stricter filter. If it works correctly, this place should speed up considerably. I just hope no humans get unfarly cut off.

Banshee · Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2026 1:57 am Post subject:

The solution seems to be working well, or at least a way better than before. Please, post your feedback.

wow4ik81 · Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2026 1:30 pm Post subject:

is noticeably better

Guest_Anubis · Guest

I don't wish to cause frustration as I expect site maintenance must be a real hassle at times, but I just wanted convey my experience. I've tried several times to log in over the last week or so, and the page annoyingly refreshes and loops as I submit my details. Connecting to the forums side specifically has been 50/50 as I often receive page time out errors and must wait a while for the handshake to properly initialize.

I'd like to see the site to grow and entice decent traffic and engagement, as there's a lot of awesome creative work buried away here. But as new member the log in glitches and slowness are a bit of a turn off, frankly. Sorry. Probably not what you wanted to hear. For the veteran contributors, however, I'm sure many appreciate the efforts in keeping the site somewhat operational.

Banshee · Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2026 1:16 am Post subject:

Anubis, the experience you had was expected and I had that as well. We are hosted in a single machine. We do not have enough money to maintain our service with a better host than that. And recently, this server is getting hordes and hordes of denial of service attempts or at least a massive bot activity that has overloaded us. For this reason, during this week, I have coded from scratch an automatic anti-bot flooding system for this place. I could only test it in production (I have no development or testing environment to test it).

So, the feedback I requested was about what was happening after this post, which is after the implementation of all stages of our anti-flood system.