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Unusual causes of big problems
I'm interested in hearing some stories that people have where they experienced some big crippling problems with websites, servers or networks and the cause of which were obscure things that nobody would think to look for.
Here's an example I have: A large e-commerce website we were running was slow as hell. Traffic was normal, we double and triple checked the queries that the scripts ran, and we set up some nice caching on the server, but the site still crawled.
It turned out to be a rogue search spider that was crawling the site. It totally ignored the robots.txt and it relentlessly loaded fresh pages searching for content to index. We had to ban the spider's IP and once we did, the site ran perfectly... better than before in fact.
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