Site slow, is this is DoS?

[sounds]

On and off for the past month -ish, I've noticed the forum doesn't load at first.

If it's hosted in the cloud, many things could be the cause. Is the site suffering from a DoS?

[nullplan]

Worse, it is suffering from AI crawlers. These things were written so badly, they cause way more traffic and CPU/database load than they should have to to do their job. But for now, all the site owner can do is twist the thumb screws for high-traffic users and hope that makes them go away.

[ell1e]

How about deploying Anubis? https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

I heard it helps a lot with this. I wouldn't know how that affects regular search engine indexing though.

[araxestroy]

The site owner only checks in once per 1d6+9 months, unfortunately. Anubis would help but based on the usual webmaster check-in schedule, we'd probably need to catch up on a decade worth of PHP updates first.