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AnonJr
Moderator
United States
5768 Posts |
 Posted - 28 November 2007 : 07:10:04
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I'm sorry, I'm not sure I see the problem. The spike in bandwidth is a bugger, but its not like I haven't had bored individuals come close to visiting the entire forum (sans archive) in a day.
If you really feel that strongly about it, find out what it reports in the User Agent string and block it the same way you would block Forum Poster or some other such tool (see this topic for the code) |
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pdrg
Support Moderator
United Kingdom
2897 Posts |
Posted - 01 December 2007 : 11:03:49
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True tale, on a parallel here...
My Father-in-law was working for a massive consultancy on a system to provide real-world up-to-date, 10-second update data for electricity routing within the UK, enabling generating companies to bring power stations online to meet demand. Starting up a power station takes 20-odd minutes (often a lot longer, depending on the type of station), so having the data updated six times a minute was deemed to be plenty - indeed, a polling interval of once per minute was about as frequent as would be useful to most companies, so a faster refresh was a real plus. In the end, as opposed to six 10-second windows per minute, they were able to provide second-by-second updates via a dedicated web server and database (with only 5 customers it was well within spec and tolerence for the boxes they used).
They went live, and the server ground to a halt very quickly - this was most unexpected, so they started investigating...4 of the 5 clients were polling one data point a few times a minute, and were thrilled (when they could connect)...the fifth was polling 20 times a second (for a data point that changed at fastest once a second, and was originally scoped to change 6 times a minute) for several data points - many of which were static values. Someone else's poor system design killed the project for everyone. In the end, they got the heavy-polling company to appreciate there was no point in polling the static values, and no point in polling the critical data point more than once a second - and everybody ended up with the system they originally wanted.
Fact is, some users/tools are not intelligent/considerate, and will download and locally cache a whole forum three times a day just for the benefit of a few local users. A car-price aggregator in Birmingham used to run hundreds of different dial-up accounts with different companies just to change IP address often enough to not get barred from screenscraping entire websites several times a day |
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