phpMyFAQ

Has been a while since I checked into this thread, thanks for all the additional info.

By logging the HTTP_USER_AGENT I also came up with the apparently new crawler "meta-externalagent" (see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/web-crawlers).
Blocking this via robots.txt has ...

not sure how to figure that out but these are some of the relevant IPs:

173.252.107.12
57.141.0.6
57.141.0.11
57.141.0.4

That was fast: Turns out the request are coming from Facebook/Meta IPs.

I assume that somewhere a crawler or link preview functionality in a facebook post is hitting on an URL that included a search request, and every time someone calls up that post a new search is registered. Will now look into ...

Thank you, that helped me out a lot. I can now log the relevant IPs and we will see where that gets me.

Hi all,

an instance of phpMyFAQ I manage is getting spammed with identical searches every other second - I can see table _faqsearches grow. Unnoticed, that lead to the table reaching 2.5 million lines over time and resulted in 100% CPU usage of the (rather low-end) server who struggled with the ...