Just to let you know that we’re aware of performance issues this morning on gitlab.pavlovia.org which you can see on https://status.pavlovia.org/
The server has actually hardly been offline at all* but is being swarmed by requests to its public API from somebody constantly scanning the projects and that means the response time of the server is so long that it appears to be unavailable.
* At least, not yet, although we likely will need to take it fully offline at some point this morning while adding tools to mitigate the issue
What does this mean for users?
Rest assured that data are still being collected and unaffected. The experience for participants in your study will be unaffected, as the data collection step occurs on an entirely different server that is not under the same heavy load. There may be a delay in users being able to download that data, however, due to delays in getting the data synchronised back to gitlab, which is the server where researchers interact with their projects.
OK, service has resumed on Gitlab and you should be able to go ahead and log in and sync your projects again.
Apologies for the interruption. Someone was deliberately evading the rate limits and constantly sending requests to the server (through VPNs with constantly shifting IP addresses to avoid the rate-limit). We are investigating ways to prevent this from happening again in the future.
But, for now you should be able to get back to your projects
Hi Jon, Thank you for working on this. However, now I still see an error on each of my GitLab repositories: “An error occurred while fetching folder content.” and I cant see the files in the repositories. Is this expected? Just need to wait for few hours?
Hi, Tried. The error is still here unfortunately. My collaborators also logged in and saw the same error on this repositories. It is clearly related to the repositories, not the accounts.
Yes, I can see the same, although the contents of the folder actually looks fine, as far as I can tell so far. We had to shutdown a couple of the API endpoints that were being abused and my guess is that one of those is used in showing the contents of the folders. We’ll keep investigating.
@sijiazhao I presume this isn’t affecting your work or availability of files?
I don’t know if this is related. The sync button no longers works the same way for me as before.
Now it only commits the changes locally, and I have to manually git push to GitLab. But then the online pilot will not be updated. I have to toggle the “inactive” and then “ pilot” to force the changes online/server. Everytime I make a small change, I need to go through all of these over again. Any recommendation?
I have just updated to the new version v2026.1.3, on a Mac. Happy to provide more details.
