Mass vCard Download leads to Server timeout

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Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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  • 12/19/2014 at 10:26 am #313152
    IT Department
    Participant

    Since some days we experienced several Webserver shutdowns, due to too many connections, leading to 408 errors:

    Request Timeout — the server took longer than its allowed time to
    process the request. Often caused by heavy net traffic.

    However. Our Hostmaster said, that he could see that there were to many vCard-Downloads from Connections.

    I already commented out the line for the vCard-Download in the Template file of Slim Plus:

    /* $entry->vcard(); */

    But of course the download links like domain.com/connections/name_base/entry/vcard/ remain still active.

    Is there a way to deactivate them completely? Like with a snippet for the child theme-functions? Or can you build in a feature in Connections to deactivate it by option?

    12/22/2014 at 10:28 am #313293
    Steven Zahm
    Keymaster

    @ roy

    Hmmm, interesting, the links are marked as nofollow but it sounds like a bot that scanned that pages is hitting them. If that is the case, since the link is in the bots db it’ll keep hitting them until it reindexes the page and removes the link from its index because it is no longer on the source page.

    It’s also odd that this would be the cause of heavy traffic. The vCard is created and sent very early in the WordPress execution stack. Basically meaning, much less resource intensive than a normal page load.

    Can you host tell what is hitting the links and how often … this info would be in you’re sites access logs.

    Question … how many entries per page do you have your directory set to? I took a look at the directory, it seems like it is around 50. That’s at the top end max that I recommend. This actually could be the source of the 408 errors. That really depends on the host. Listing that many does require resources … same would happen if you listed that many WordPress posts per page, so it is not a connections related issue. If you want that many, and it is the source of the error, you might want to look at a plugin like WP Rocket.

    Oh, almost forgot… you can use an .htaccess file to block hits to the /vcard/ page. That’ll be the easiest solution.

    I hope that helps, let me know!

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