Userscripts.org, the biggest repository of greasemonkey scripts, is currently unavailable to users. The site is not opening properly, and the following message appears:
We are currently being hit with 6000 requests a second.. sorry, I cannot keep the servers up for that amount of load.
We observed the HTTP headers, and conclude that the site is NOT down as the site returned the normal 200 HTTP status. We hope that this problem may be because of any mis-configuration at the server.
We obtained the following HTTP header response:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: userscripts.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-aliveHTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.6.34
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:06:06 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:18:03 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Encoding: gzip
Stay tuned for the updates.
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Arpit – I guess the site is under a DDOS attack. 6,000 hits/sec.
From what I’m guessing, it’s one or several badly coded scripts accessing the Userscripts site on each click on another website.
I saw plenty of those poorly made update checkers without any sort of time limit added. Let’s hope for a quick resolution.
Probably too many user scripts are accessing the site for checking version updates
any other source to download greasemonkey script? Why does not Mozilla host all greasemonkey scripts on own server like add-ons??
dear Luis,
yeah … I also feel that it is denial-of-service attack on userscripts.org
Mozilla has nothing to do with the userscript
why would Mozilla host the script for them?
daily page views | ~~ 2.2 million
daily visitors | ~~ 650000
site rank | ~~ 3111th
domain online | April 6, 2005 (~~5 years ago)
(based on Alexa estimates, as of April 28, 2010)
Wow, this is pretty major. And it looks like google has already spidered the site in its downtime, as some of the link text has changed to the error message. I wonder how long this will last? My browser wants its power-ups!
@Neverever. me thinks you would be very surprised at how many users choose ff only for the use of greasemonkey scripts…
update:
userscripts.org is undergoing unplanned maintenance
If you are looking for a script, please come back Thursday 8PM PDT, by which time the new code should be deployed to block the “attack”work continues to revive the site. The database and all the content is ok.
I’m still trying to block between 1000 and 10,000 requests per second caused
by some run-away userscripts who set their update interval to 10 milliseconds
instead of 10 seconds (still too often).
thousands of computers are trying to hit the server every 10ms, causing a DDOS.
If you are going to use setInterval/setTimeout in your code, please
read the docs on how to use it. I’ve been working with friends who work on scalabilty at large websites in
the valley on improving this and we hope to deploy a fix tomorrow.
sorry for outage but I’ve been working non-stop trying to fix this with
as many resources as I can muster.
ps. please don’t email me asking for a script. I am spending all my time
implementing & testing the changes we’ve been working on.
pps. userscripts.org uses softlayer who has and continues to do an amazing
job at support. the site normally consumes multiple TB of bandwidth a month,
handling an average of 100 req/s.
Update: The site is up. :)
According to a blog post on official blog of UserScripts.org:
via http://userscripts.org/articles/29-downtime
I’d like to know which widely used script was causing the problem. The site just vaguely says it was a script updater.
And I think this is a good argument to have a userscript.org mirror site somewhere too.
@[LMAO]
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/
Number of downloads for Firefox is about 550 million
and this is just for FF3.6 only
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/748
Number of downloads for Greasemonkey is about 31 million (Total downloads from 1st release) and Daily Active User is about 2.6 million (< 2% of total FF user)
LAMO, please tell me what would surprise me by looking at these numbers…or have you got better looking stats ?
correct to my previous post.
percentage of active Greasemnkey Users should be less than 0.5 % of total Firefox3.6 Users (2.6 million / 550 million)
weeks have gone by and it’s still down. this sucks. could they maybe bring it back online on a new domain? maybe with some kind of rate limiting this time.
boourns: no, there was a second (brief) outage five days after this one: http://blog.arpitnext.com/2010/05/userscript-org-ddos-attack-down.html