[ckan-dev] API abuse

Thu Apr 18 13:25:27 UTC 2013

Hello,

The simplest approach to this, and we have done this on the datahub, was to
limit api requests to 1 req/s per ip.  This was done with nginx though.
http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpLimitReqModule

Thanks

David

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Toby Dacre <toby.okfn at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 18 April 2013 11:13, David Read <david.read at hackneyworkshop.com> wrote:
>
>> We had an incident yesterday caused by a java web bot making
>> simultaneous connections to our CKAN API. Averaging 10 requests per
>> second, it caused serious server problems - postgres filling the CPU
>> use, Apache spawning lots of processes. Normally big loads are not a
>> problem for us because of using a cache in front of CKAN, but because
>> the API v3 is not easily cached, it caused the problems.
>>
>> The user was POSTing requests to package_show, without api key. Nagios
>> alerted us to the slowing server and we banned their IP manually
>> within a few minutes to take it back to normal. But it has become a
>> concern.
>>
>> Does anyone have any thoughts on how the CKAN community might deal
>> with this sort of behaviour better, either in the design of CKAN or
>> with server software?
>>
>
> Hmmm,
>
> there are a few approaches.
>
> 1) we could look at rate limiting api calls but that might be painful have
> overheads and block some legitimate use
>
> 2) we could insist on a valid API key much earlier in the process (do we
> allow anon api access?  or add a config option for this)
>
> 3) package_show is hard because we get the package from the db even if we
> then find we won't show it - this is hard to avoid though maybe we could
> look at pre auth checking before even hitting the db but I'm not sure that
> would help here
>
> I think 2 is the easiest/quickest approach but it might be too blunt
>
> Toby
>
>
>
>> David
>>
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>
>
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