How serious is "site is under extreme load, search is disabled, try again later"

[tobiaseigen]

I Just got a report of another similar looking notification. We are doing an AMA and have a few more people than usual reading and posting in the forum, but I am not convinced that this is extreme load. Maybe a plugin like Discourse Who's Online Plugin is causing additional load?

@bartv

Hmm, only 1800 pageviews in 24 hours by a crawler should not put that much extra load on your server though. It might be worth opening your access log and just watch the requests come in when this happens, it could point to the real issue. It could be someone trying to hack you, or hammering your API with requests.

Thanks! I will look into this now.

@Falco

Discourse gained a lot of those graceful degradation features recently as we work to scale out and handle some crazy level of traffic for the largest Discourse instances on the internet.

Is there a way to disable these in an admin setting and just let people wait if it is getting slow? I think our site is still not especially busy.