Holy Schnikies, That's A Lot of Hits!
As I took a break from hardcore coding activities this afternoon, I decided to check up on my site stats and comments, as I often do. When I got into my Textpattern admin panel and clicked on “Logs”, I nearly had a heart attack. My logs are up to 1,060 pages!
I usually only have log pages in the double-digits because I select to have them expire after 7 days, so 1,060 pages is quite a jump. A quick look at the latest page and a look back at random pages throughout the logs reveals that a single IP address has been requesting the same two images for the past four hours. That’s 52,000 requests, averaging 14 requests per second. The result? Thanks a lot, jerk, you just cost me roughly 250MB in bandwidth.
I’d post the IP, but there’s a chance the aforementioned jerk was simply the hapless user of a buggy browser. Is that possible? I seem to remember a high-profile blogger (I could have sworn it was Mike Davidson) writing about a similar experience recently, but I can’t seem to track down the entry. Luckily, I was able to ban the IP through .htaccess, but I am not happy. Has anything like this happened to anyone else? Oh, I’m sure it has. What did you do? Did you figure out how to prevent it from happening again?
My apologies to anyone who timed out or couldn’t get on the site this afternoon. I think we’re safe… for now.