Indeed. I enabled the bots filter, as often it helps.
I'll probably soon try Cloudflare to see if it can filter more effectively for that, or if I should try to implement myself in the site some limit on number of requests that can be made.
Or migrate to a more powerful server, but that takes time

Extremely slow. Not just you.

Is it just me or is the site that slow once again?

At that time it might be the daily backup (somewhere around 6-6:30 CET I think)
Maybe I should disable bots automatically during the backup, that would already help.

Though they have nothing in comment, they are not even on the same continent

Site is very slow right now.

I don't know what is going on, but both the site and the forum are running super slow right now.

After several days of not getting any Discover ads, they started appearing again today.

The ads don't bother me unless they become intrusive. The problem is some of the ads that are supposed to sit in the right-side box on most pages have been popping up at the bottom of the page instead as a full-width pop-up that blocks any function on the page.

Normally those on the site do not flash either (and do not even have animations, or very subtle ones)