AI could kill your app, even if you don't use it.
Since 2022 software development is no longer what it used to be. There's a new player in the game: the almighty (or scary?) LLM. Many companies have been early adopters of LLMs. Some of them are profiting from it. Some of them are selling cars for $1. I am not here to judge.
Even if you haven't jumped on the LLM train yet, it may still affect your application.
With the rapid growth of LLM services, there's also a rapid growth in the number of bots that crawl the data to feed them. Some of them follow internet etiquette. Some of them don't. One example is ClaudeBot.
In one of our consulting jobs we were confronted with this problem. The application was dying once, or actually several times a day. Literally.
One of the reasons was that ClaudeBot was scanning the application's product catalogue page, which happened to be slow. An obvious solution is to block ClaudeBot in robots.txt. But is that all?
If you think about this situation, ClaudeBot, besides its greediness and fetching the data in an unpleasant way, generated a kind of stress test. And the application failed.
Blocking it masked the problem. But during possible peaks (hello Black Friday), the same situation can occur. So what do you do?
Well, improve the performance of the site. Slow performance is often caused by N 1 or by eagerly loading data that you don't even show.