Multiple Page Refreshes Keep overloading my server
 

I'm getting 500 guests appearing at the same time from multiple ip address, that are repeatedly refreshing a subforum page, this is overloading my server and causing it to lock up and need to be hard rebooted,

any suggestions on a possible solution for this?

We had this a while back and since then I've seen others with the problem. The guests are all from different places so banning or blocking won't help. In our case they were all doing different things.

The best suggestion I got was to check my referrers. I blocked the #1 on the list but it didn't seem to help a lot. But after a while they just sort of calmed down on their own I guess. Later my host (shared server) said I should have contacted them but I don't know what they could have done.

I just checked and it says my most users was 115 on 7/8 which is at least tolerable. But still unbelievable for my slow forum. But much better than 600!

I too used to have MULTITUDES of (needless) guests and once I started investigating who/what they were I was stunned at how much bandwidth we wasted each month.

Here's what you're looking for: Zb Block - Stop Spam & 'bots @ Server

Most interesting. I'm not going to mess with it right now, but if I was under active attack I'm sure I would.

thanks for that going to give it a go

What page were they all looking at? I saw this on a forum I used to own.. they were all looking at the chat archive for the chat block. I disabled the chat and they stopped coming..