So, the server that hosts the front-end via Tor will see the exit node connecting to it

The onion eliminates the use of exit nodes. But I know what you mean.

I appreciate the explanation. It sounds like replicating the backend and DB on the Tor node would help. Not sure how complex it would be to have the DBs synchronise during idle moments.

Perhaps a bit radical, but I wonder if it would be interesting to do a nightly DB export to JSON or CSV files that are reachable from the onion front end. Scrapers would prefer that over scraping, and it would be less intrusive on the website. Though I don’t know how tricky it would be to exclude non-public data from the dataset.

psy is on /this/ instance. Note my question was directed to the mander admins, who would only have the power to make me a mod on the node under their control.

I’ve not tried the onion instance since reporting the data loss issue, but in principle a the onion host could be a good candidate for read-only access (scraping).

Would it perhaps make sense to redirect the greedy subnet to the onion instance? I wonder if it’s even possible. The privacyinternational website used to auto-detect requests from Tor exit nodes and automatically redirect to their onion site. In the case of mander, it would do that for the subnet giving problems. They are obviously not using Tor to visit your site, but they could have Tor installed. You would effectively be sending the msg “hey, plz do your scraping on the onion node,” which is gentler than blocking in case there is more legit traffic from the same subnet. That is assuming your problem is not scraping generally but just that they are hogging bandwidth that competes with most users. The Tor network has some built-in anti-DDoS logic now, supposedly, so they would naturally get bottlenecked IIUC.

I guess the next question is whether the onion site has a separate allocation of bandwidth. But even if it doesn’t, Tor has a natural bottleneck b/c traffic can only move as fast as the slowest of the 3 hops the circuit goes through.

When the hard-working little swimmers encounter the thicker vaginal mucus, their path is slowed. So the sperm often join together at their heads, which gives them greater swimming speed (up to 50 percent faster) than if they were to carry on individually.

I wonder why that is. If a group of people were to join together and run, the speed of the group would be capped by the slowest runner. And aerodynamics would be worse.