Our web site traffic rose from 37000 hits last Wednesday to 64000 hits on Thursday. Good sales and marketing activity on our part? No - it's a potential problem; all the extra traffic came from a single location and my immediate concerns included:

* Possible denial of service, where all the bandwidth was being eaten up by the visitor.
* What use were they making of what was approaching a complete copy of the site?
* Potential extra costs if we were to hit our traffic ceiling

On this occasion, I noticed that we had a problem on Friday when I looked at the previous day's log analysis and spotted the problem sticking out like a sore thumb. I spent a couple of hours yesterday investigating more thoroughly, and putting a filter in place to cap aggressive browsing as it happens - a piece of PHP some 30 or 40 lines long. PHP's a powerful language, so in those lines I'm also able to add a permanent record of the potential abuse to a database ...

If you want to read more, I've put a technical analysis and sample PHP script in our solution centre.
(written 2005-06-12 07:17:19)

 

Associated topics are indexed under

W512 - Web and Intranet - Site Design Aspects
A603 - Web Application Deployment - Further httpd Configuration
H117 - Security in PHP
H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling

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The evening after the course
Happy Birthday, PHP
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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