Tar-pitting bots in their own PHP pools

For reasons completely unrelated to the number 4, I have been having a hard look at this site. Like the rest of the Internet, it has received a large amount of undesirable traffic in the last couple of years. To counter that, I have been using a couple of WordPress plugins to help identify and hinder bots. First Blackhole bad bots, which sets booby-trapped links and bans the robots that follow them. More recently, I also added JTZL’s bot maze, to offer them some delightful LinkedIn-grade content to read, and also waste a bit of their time. But this site started being unresponsive for everyone! No good. This is because all traffic was served by a set number of PHP workers, and everybody’s HTTP requests was waiting behind bots. tl;dr: to avoid fate-sharing between humans and certified bots, I set up a separate PHP pool; to avoid queuing and waiting at the web-server boundary, I dropped Apache, and set-up Nginx instead. PHP FastCGI Process Manager receives requests from the web server,…