index.php stops working suddenly and causes performance issue

[hzhang]

Our school's website has used SMF 2.0 RC3 for many years without problem. The forum URL is at:

www dot pittsburgh-chinese-school dot org/forum2010/

Two days ago Fastdomain (our website host) notified us the website was deactivated due to performance issue with the the following information:

Customers forum is getting a lot of traffic from something that appears to be a Chinese search engine spider. Customer needs to optimize site, reduce the rate that bot crawls it, and check contents of the forum to make sure bots have not posted to it. 106.11.153.252 - - [20/Jul/2018:12:20:42 -0600] "GET /forum2010/index.php?PHPSESSID=37rn4l1sepql1vdse3fa5v2ed0&action=.xml;type=rss HTTP/1.1" 503 664 "-" "YisouSpider"

We got the website reactivated after renaming index.php to something else temporarily and promising adding some restrictions to bad bots. But now without changing anything yet, the index.php stops working and it takes long time for the web server giving a HTTP ERROR 500. By checking the error_log file, SMF started to have the issue on 7/19/2018, right before the website was deactivated.

[19-Jul-2018 13:32:13 US/Eastern] PHP Fatal error:  Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home1/pittsbur/public_html/forum2010/Sources/Subs-Db-mysql.php on line 667

Please advice on how to resolve the issue. The index.php file is renamed to tmp_index.php for now. The rest files can be listed on the above link. The associated database appear working when I use mysql from ssh shell. The problem can be reproduced by visiting the tmp_index.php file.

Thanks,
hzhang

[hzhang]

Forgot to mention. The database is mysql database.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

First, you really really really should get up to date. That version is old enough to go to school itself.

Secondly, your host seems a bit aggressive on the issue.
Bots should not be your issue to fight really, and the error you are seeing doesn't tell much more than some script took more than 30 seconds to run... in itself not unusual really, not common either, but completely normal for PHP applications. (Renaming index.php is not a good idea however, and will break the forum. )

To lessen the strain from bots, you can use the file cache, and either use a robots.txt to try and control bot behaviour, or ban certain bots on server level using htaccess or dedicated security tools your host may provide.

You should upgrade though, first thing you do.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Also, I would strongly suggest you concider switching hosts.
FastDomain (fastdomain.com) has become part of Bluehost since December 2006 (or earlier). Bluehost was later acquired by EIG.
EIG is a known overseller and source for trouble.

[hzhang]

I am upgrading the forum to 2.0.15 as suggested, after the step "Setting the birthday email template if not set...done" I got an error "Server has not responded for 30 seconds. It may be worth waiting a little longer or otherwise please click here to try this step again" .

What can I do? Is this an issue from the host?  Thanks!

[hzhang]

Never mind! After clicking here to try this step again I could have the upgrade finished. It works now. Thank you!

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Most commonly that message does not require any action, and the upgrade will move on after a while.
Glad you got it done though