Over a period of almost 20 hours people may have noticed Geekzone was sometimes slow to respond, not responding at all or just spitting out 500 errors (Server error).

Our database server was running at 100% most of this period. After investigating we found a couple of queries that could be optimised but this was not the actual root cause. Further investigation revealed a very large number of page requests coming from China - sometimes at more than 150 - 200 per second. Our poor little server couldn't cope with the stress at a times.

At around 6pm I implemented a whole country block, preventing requests originating from China to reach our server. I had to block the whole country because the requests were coming from different networks.

With this block in place the server was able to return to normal operation. At the end of the 24 hour period we had about 3.8 million requests, with 2.6 million coming from China alone.

The block remains in place, regardless of @sbiddle plans to visit the country in the near future.