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Based on this graph, and this graph alone, guess at what time I completely blocked OpenAI crawlers
(jlai.lu)
I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Yeah I had the same thing. All of a sudden the load on my server was super high and I thought there was a huge issue. So I looked at the logs and saw an AI crawler absolutely slamming my server. I blocked it, so it only got 403 responses but it kept on slamming. So I blocked the IPs it was coming from in iptables, that helped a lot. My little server got about 10000 times the normal traffic.
I sorta get they want to index stuff, but why absolutely slam my server to death? Fucking assholes.
My best guess is that they don't just index things, but rather download straight from the internet when they need fresh training data. They can't really cache the whole internet after all...
Bingo, modern datasets are a list of URL's with metadata rather than the files themselves. Every new team/individual wanting to work with the dataset becomes another DDoS participant.
The sad thing is that they could cache the whole internet if there was a checksum protocol.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I actually hate the idea that there are several companies out there with graph databases of the entire internet.