Starting Syspeace 3.1 takes a long time after upgrading

Starting Syspeace 3.1 or above for the first time after upgrading from Syspeace 3.0.1 or lower may take a long time. This is expected and will not happen on subsequent starts. Depending on how much login traffic the server sees, it may take up to a few hours.

What’s Syspeace doing to cause this delay?

Syspeace needs to match patterns of login attempts to its rules to see if a block is warranted. This process happens all the time as login attempts arrive, happens on startup and periodically for other reasons, and also happens retroactively when you change a rule, for example. Previous versions of Syspeace used a way of doing this that involved loading a lot of information from the database of login attempts and keeping all information in memory to do the matching. From 3.1 on, Syspeace uses a separate, optimized database on disk to handle this matching logic with database queries instead. The long startup period is needed to fill the new database with information from the existing data, and it’s proportional to how much data is involved. This conversion only needs to happen once.