Been seeing a lot of "429 Too Many Requests"

1

When I try to access our project “confluence”, I (in recent days) have frequently been seeing:
429 Too Many Requests
You have sent too many requests in a given amount of time.

But I usually have not been sending many requests recently.

Please fix this.

1 Like
2

Could you please expand on what steps you typically take, and what (if any) difference you see between when you get the error and when you don’t? For example, “Using Firefox, with [list of plugins here], I open https://confluence.org/ in a new tab. This works fine. I can also right click (or control-click) and open each of three side bar links in a new tab. This also works. However, if I…”

I’m unable to reproduce your error here without setting up scripted load testing tools, which is exactly the context in which we should be seeing a 429 error. I’m not saying there’s not a problem, however. I’m saying we need you to be more specific about the context in which the error happens in which it shouldn’t if we are to correct it.

3

I can’t get it to happen consistently - but here’s how I got it to happen just now:

  1. In Firefox, I visited “www.confluence.org”
  2. Then, almost immediately, in the same Firefox tab, I visited “confluence.org /search.php”. (Delete the space before the “/”; I had to insert that here to get the URL to render properly.)

On the second request, I (sometimes) get a “429 Too Many Requests” “You have sent too many requests in a given amount of time.” error.

Whatever mechanism you have recently turned on in the web server to enable this is clearly not working as intended. Please turn it off!

4

Hi again. In order for me to recreate your issue, I have to force-reload DCP: Search page while holding shift (forcing cache override), and I have to do so repeatedly and quickly more than four times. Can you tell me more about your setup? Do you have something scripted running on the same machine as the browser that has this problem that is fetching from DCP?

We cannot go back to the systems we were using last month, as those systems were End of Life and subject to multiple security issues. We are willing and happy to work with you to keep your site working and available to the public; we need you to coöperate with us in that process. Your assistance here may in fact help improve ibiblio services for everyone.

After some brief review, I think your homepage could benefit from some cache headers for preview images, since each of these images is unlikely to change more than once per week. And even if they are likely to change once per day, you could set a value of 12 hours and see a major benefit. If you’d like us to set cache headers for preview images, let me know.

5

No, I have nothing ‘scripted’ on this machine - I just load one page from “confluence.org” in one Firefox browser tab; and then immediately afterwards load (in the same browser tab) another page from “confluence.org”. Sometimes, but not always, I get the “429 Too Many Requests” error on the second load.

I’m not asking you to “go back to the systems that you were using last month” (whatever those were). I’m just asking you to look at the parameters in your web server that trigger the “429 Too Many Requests” response, and tweak them so that they’re not so sensitive. Or consider turning off this feature altogether, if you’re not seeing a lot of denial-of-service traffic (especially for this site). (I presume that this ‘feature’ is intended to mitigate denial-of-service attacks.)

6

Okay, thanks Ross. I’ll mark this topic as closed.