gitweb broken?
Sourceware has lowered the difficulty for its Anubis proof-of-work system to address performance issues and slow commit browsing.
Mark Wielaard reports that Sourceware has reduced the difficulty of the Anubis proof-of-work system from 5 to 4, aiming to improve performance for users experiencing slow commit browsing. They also switched the wiki and Bugzilla from meta-refresh to JavaScript challenges to combat scraper attacks.
- proposer
Announces that the Anubis difficulty has been lowered to 4 to improve speed and that challenges for wiki and Bugzilla were updated.
“We lowered the difficulty to 4, which hopefully helps with the speed.”
- other
Observes that Anubis remains slow, with commit browsing taking over a minute, and notes the fake progress bar behavior.
- other
Reports that web pages appear normal, but Anubis is still very slow, citing a specific commit as an example.
Technical Tradeoffs
- Lowering proof-of-work difficulty may reduce effectiveness against sophisticated botnets.
- Switching challenge types (meta-refresh to JavaScript) might affect users with older browsers or specific accessibility needs.
In Details
The Sourceware infrastructure team has adjusted the Anubis proof-of-work difficulty to level 4 to mitigate performance issues reported by users, such as slow access to git commit information. Additionally, they've updated challenge mechanisms on other services like Bugzilla and the wiki to counter botnet activity.
- Anubis
- A proof-of-work system used by Sourceware to mitigate automated access and bot traffic. Users must solve a computational challenge to gain access.
- gitweb
- A web-based interface for browsing Git repositories, commonly used by open-source projects for code repository access.
- cgit
- An alternative web-based interface for Git repositories, often considered more efficient than gitweb.
- Proof-of-work
- A system requiring a non-trivial computational effort to deter malicious use, often used for spam prevention or access control.