Jeremy Andrews wrote:
I ran into a problem with the way Drupal caches data today. A spam bot started crawling my site for the past 36 hours or so, posting dozens of comments every minute (frequently several a second). Combined with normal traffic, my site was serving 3-400 pages every 60 seconds. Because the spam comments were being posted at such a high speed, the cache was being flushed too quickly to do any good. I may as well have disabled the cache. The site became sluggish. (It has handled that large a load before, just not with comments being posted so quickly)
As an extra solution you could leverage on the new flood protection mechanism I introduced in Drupal 4.6. See flood_register_event() and flood_is_allowed(), and check the contact.module in CVS HEAD to see how it can be used. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/