OAC site performance issues: stabilized

Last updated 2025-08-12

2025-08-12:  Site performance stabilized by limiting traffic from AI bots and modifying the provision of HTML versions of extensive finding aids; we are continuing to closely monitor the site.

Our team discovered that serving up printable HTML guides for very large, nested files at the traffic rate generated by the AI bots was the primary source of the site performance issues experienced at launch, so we are temporarily linking to stored static HTML pages from the legacy OAC site for those specific finding aids. As of 8/8, this applies to HTML guides for finding aids with over 300 <c0#> components. These static HTML pages served by the legacy OAC site will not include any new data submitted after June 30th, as they are limited to displaying finding aid data submitted through the legacy OAC system. 

In the next few months, we will investigate new strategies to ensure that all finding aids in the new OAC system, regardless of size, feature up-to-date, single-page printable guides. We will also be engaging with the ArcLight development community to address this issue, which other institutions have also found to be very challenging.

2025-07-29: OAC is currently experiencing site performance issues due to an extreme increase in traffic. Our analysis of this behavior indicates that bots are likely scraping data to inform AI and large language models (LLM). We are actively working to address this issue and stabilize the site.

If you continue to experience errors, please visit a recent snapshot of OAC at https://oac4.cdlib.org, which is available as a temporary measure until site performance improves.

We will provide updates on this page.

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