[ale] apache problem

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

On 01/12/2011 12:50 PM, John Heim wrote:
> All,
> 
> I have a problem with an apache web server. The problem is that one of my
> users has some large PDF documents available for
> download. Every few weeks, our server gets bogged down when someone tries to
> download these documents many thousands of times.  They download each 
> document only once or twice a second but over and over and over. Eventually, 
> our server gets bogged down. The documents are mostly in the 1.5Mb to 2Mb 
> range.
[snip]
> Any suggestions for preventing this? I thought about forcing people to
> register or putting  up a CAPTCHA. But I'd rather not do those things. I'd
> rather just prevent a single IP from downloading each document more than
> once a day or something like that.

Maybe one of these could help. I haven't used them, only done some quick
googling.

http://www.cohprog.com/mod_bandwidth.html
http://dominia.org/djao/limitipconn2.html
http://bwmod.sourceforge.net/
http://codee.pl/cband.html

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts