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Incidents/2020-02-07 mediawiki API down

From Wikitech

document status: in-review

Summary

A bot scraping zhwiki, which we have been monitoring for a while now, started making more expensive requests more aggressively. The bot was concealing itself by using a common User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.130 Safari/537.36

Most requests were similar to: 

http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&pageid=2996886&prop=text&wrapoutputclass=wiki-article&disableeditsection=true&mobileformat=true&mainpage=true&format=json

The wrapoutclass url parameter causes a request to bypass parsercache. To make matters worse, the scraper was going through the whole list of French localities on zhwiki, each of which made ample use of some known slow templates, originally seen on occitan wikipedia (euwiki), with the 36k entry table of localities. Each of those requests required 15-60 seconds to parse.

Lastly, while we were investigating, an unscheduled deployment was pushed to production, to fix an UNB! task. The deployment caused s8 to recive an influx of queries, so it was quickly reverted Incident_documentation/20200207-wikidata.

Impact

API became almost unresponsive for about 10 minutes and. Application servers were unresponsive for another 10 minutes a little bit after.

Detection

14:06:40 <+icinga-wm> PROBLEM - MediaWiki exceptions and fatals per minute on icinga1001
14:06:41 <+icinga-wm> PROBLEM - High average POST latency for mw requests on api_appserver in eqiad on icinga1001 is CRITICAL:

14:09:42 <+icinga-wm> PROBLEM - High average GET latency for mw requests on api_appserver in eqiad on icinga1001 is CRITICAL: 
14:09:52 <+icinga-wm> PROBLEM - Apache HTTP on mw1290 is CRITICAL: CRITICAL

14:17:07 <+icinga-wm> RECOVERY - Nginx local proxy to apache on mw1283 is OK: HTTP OK:

Timeline

All times in UTC.

  • 14:06 OUTAGE #1 BEGINS

We start parsing API logs, where we establish that it the zhwiki bot we have been monitoring, is making very expensive requests. The requests were both bypassing parsercache and included some infamous templates. It is using a very common UA, one that is used by real users as well, so blocking would be not be easy.



Conclusions

Templates issues are hard to debug.

What went well?

We already were aware of the bot being active in zhwiki as well as its activity. It was the first thing we looked, and it easily stood out in the logs.

What went poorly?

It is hard to pinpoint when an issue is due to a template as well as which template it is. Also, this bot was using a common UA, making it a bit complicated for us to simply block it.

Where did we get lucky?

We had similar issues with euwiki with the same templates, so they were on our radar. We were also lucky that the bot slowed down rather quickly. Also that Amir was online and knew what to do.

How many people were involved in the remediation?

  • 4 SREs + 2 software engineers

None

Actionables

  • Emptify the French Commune Data templates and contact the community (already done)
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