[drupal-devel] caching issues

[Dries Buytaert]

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/