From b86b79c0008b94051f82242466b017679a4da775 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Wesley Moore Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 19:23:35 +1000 Subject: [PATCH] Format nitter post --- .../posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/index.md | 31 +++++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) diff --git a/v2/content/posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/index.md b/v2/content/posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/index.md index 2a9075d..add14ed 100644 --- a/v2/content/posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/index.md +++ b/v2/content/posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/index.md @@ -6,9 +6,10 @@ date = 2021-08-26T09:10:54+10:00 #updated = 2021-05-15T10:15:08+10:00 +++ -On 24 August I received an email from Vultr saying that my server had used 78% of its 3Tb -bandwidth allocation for the month. This was surprising as last time I looked I only used -a small fraction of this allocation across the various [things I host][alpine-docker]. +On 24 August I received an email from Vultr saying that my server had used 78% +of its 3Tb bandwidth allocation for the month. This was surprising as last time +I looked I only used a small fraction of this allocation across the various +[things I host][alpine-docker]. After some investigation I noticed that the [Nitter] instance I [set up six months ago][nitter-instance] at `nitter.decentralised.social` seemed to be @@ -16,6 +17,8 @@ getting a lot of traffic. In particular it seemed that there were several crawlers including Googlebot and bingbot attempting to index the whole site and all its media. + + Nitter is an alternate UI for Twitter that is simpler, faster, and free of tracking. I mainly set it up so that I could share Twitter links with my friends, without them having to visit Twitter proper. It's obvious in hindsight @@ -40,13 +43,14 @@ the usage graphs. {{ figure(image="posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/cpu-usage.png", link="posts/2021/nitter-bandwidth/cpu-usage.png", alt="Chart showing CPU usage for the last week with a significant drop in the last two days", caption="CPU usage, last 7 days") }} -After letting the changes sit overnight I was still seeing a lot of requests from user-agents -that appear to be Chinese bots of some sort. They almost exactly matched the user-agents -in this blog post: -[Blocking aggressive Chinese crawlers/scrapers/bots](https://www.johnlarge.co.uk/blocking-aggressive-chinese-crawlers-scrapers-bots/). +After letting the changes sit overnight I was still seeing a lot of requests +from user-agents that appear to be Chinese bots of some sort. They almost +exactly matched the user-agents in this blog post: [Blocking aggressive Chinese +crawlers/scrapers/bots](https://www.johnlarge.co.uk/blocking-aggressive-chinese-crawlers-scrapers-bots/). -As a result I added some additional configuration to Varnish to block requests from these -user-agents, as they were clearly not honouring the `robots.txt` I added: +As a result I added some additional configuration to Varnish to block requests +from these user-agents, as they were clearly not honouring the `robots.txt` I +added: ```c sub vcl_recv { @@ -60,10 +64,11 @@ sub vcl_recv { ### What Now? -I liked having the Nitter instance for sharing links but now I'm not sure how to run it in -a way that only proxies the things I'm sharing. I don't really want to be responsible for -all of the content posted to Twitter flowing through my server. Perhaps there's a project -idea lurking there, or perhaps I just make my peace with linking to Twitter. +I liked having the Nitter instance for sharing links but now I'm not sure how +to run it in a way that only proxies the things I'm sharing. I don't really +want to be responsible for all of the content posted to Twitter flowing through +my server. Perhaps there's a project idea lurking there, or perhaps I just make +my peace with linking to Twitter. [alpine-docker]: https://www.wezm.net/technical/2019/02/alpine-linux-docker-infrastructure/ [Nitter]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter