I’ve been getting a lot of these messages lately:
SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data
So I decided to look at the network requests in the browser console. After all, what JSON data was it trying and failing to parse?
Well, turns out that it was pretty much always:
Timeout occurred while waiting for a slot to become available
I don’t do a lot of backend work, but I suspect that the lack of slots might be referring to the server running out of resources to process all of the ongoing user activity concurrently. Could we be running into scaling issues?
A lot of bots were spamming the instance which was causing an IO bottleneck, and thus timeout issues. We’re looking into solutions to limit their impact, such as rate-limiting users. We’re trying to do it in such a way that it doesn’t impact regular users which is why it’s taking a bit longer.
Shit just doesn’t work
It’s A LOT worse on lemmy.world, I’d say most of the instances are overloaded that prime time instances.
It was the bot bullshit, as others have said. I was kinda expecting it once I saw the posts about the account spamming new C/s, but it hit harder and longer than I thought it would.
theres apparently some bots running around posting from it as well, may or may not be causing extra load
