Support

Admin Tools

#20420 Site getting hammered w/ page requests - Can AT block?

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Admin Tools version
n/a

Latest post by dbrat on Thursday, 03 July 2014 14:02 CDT

dbrat
How do I auto-ban IPs that are simply requesting too many pages?

My host blocked my domain dailycrowdsource.com saying that I'm using too much CPU usage.

I looked in some logs & see that certain IPs are simply requesting too many URLs. One IP accessed approximately 100 URLs in 1 minute. Here's one of the URLs: http://dailycrowdsource.com/crowdsourcing-help/english-forums/user/198-renan-kaminski

This is not a valid link, but nothing is "malicious" about it, meaning, it can't be flagged as a login attempt or including PHP in it.

His IP: 208.115.113.84

I *think* that the problem is the quantity of requests. Is there a way to block this?

This is something my host sent me:
(snippet):
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1747 mysql 15 0 369m 77m 6592 S 33.9 0.9 26:25.64 /usr/xxx datadir=/var/xxx --plugin-dir=/usr/xxxx
7423 crowdreb 34 18 80228 38m 8784 R 12.5 0.5 0:01.30 /usr/bin/php <root joomla site>/index.php


I really hope AdminTools can block this, as it's caused my site to be taken down :(

tampe125
Akeeba Staff
Hello David,

at the moment Admin Tools can't automatically block "hammering" ips.
However, if you want to save CPU usage, Admin Tools is not the right tools: it is executed inside Joomla, this means that the whole framework is loaded, the connection to the database is created, all the files are loaded from disk etc etc.
Then, and only then, our component is loaded and it starts analyzing the request and, if it is malicious, it gets blocked.

As you can see there is a lot of overhead, so blocking those IPs using Admin Tools is not the right choice; I think you should act at a server side, with an Apache module, in order to keep down your requests.

However I'll try to find some resources and I'll post theme here for reference.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

dbrat
Thanks Davide,

I've taken steps outside Admin Tools to protect the site.

I appreciate the response,
-David

Support Information

Working hours: We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Cyprus timezone (EET / EEST). Support is provided by the same developers writing the software, all of which live in Europe. You can still file tickets outside of our working hours, but we cannot respond to them until we're back at the office.

Support policy: We would like to kindly inform you that when using our support you have already agreed to the Support Policy which is part of our Terms of Service. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us help you!