[gentoo-dev] sources.gentoo.org instability

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

Hello,

For a while sources.gentoo.org has been puttering along and its health
has slowly declined. We migrated it to some newer shiny hardware in an
attempt to mitigate the problem but that did not pan out. 90% (or
more) of sources.gentoo.org traffic is crawler bots and not actual
humans. That being said; if we cannot serve requests to the bots
within our timeouts we serve 500's instead which is never really what
we want (particularly when we spent 20s of CPU to calculate 80% of the
response only to see the client timeout :/.)

The majority of the expensive requests are related to package.mask and
use.local.desc queries by crawlers. Like crawling the entire 13000 rev
history for package.mask (or similar.)

While it is likely we will monkey patch viewvc to be less wasteful; in
the meantime I have removed use.local.desc from sources.gentoo.org
(and also anoncvs, because they share the same repo.) I hope this is a
short term (order of weeks) hack.

-A