Zel has been abysmally slow lately

From what I can tell, it’s waves of bots. All connection times slow when they flood it. The server is in Texas, and that may have had an effect, though I expect the datacenter has backup power and I know it has redundant connectivity.

From what I can tell, it’s waves of bots. All connection times slow when they flood it. The server is in Texas, and that may have had an effect, though I expect the datacenter has backup power and I know it has redundant connectivity.

It's been happening for a few months I think now, so I don't think it should have to do anything with the recent power outages in Texas. Sounds like it's basically getting DDosed.

Bots have been around in similar or periodically greater numbers for years without similar slowdowns, but yes, perhaps their tactics (page refresh rates?) have changed recently.

Is it captcha time?

I expect that part of the problem is all of the connection requests hitting the IP banned page. The issue is not CPU load, but processing incoming connections.