SPUG: Re: slowing down a web form

[Richard Anderson]

The first thought that would occur to me is to have the CGI script called by
the form increment a counter in a file named using today's date.  Once you
have a backlog of seven daily counts, have the CGI script read the daily
submission rate from seven days ago and throw a random number to reject
submissions at a rate that will bring the submission rate down to the
desired rate.   Crude but effective.  Don't forget to use flock to prevent
multiple instances of the CGI script from writing the file simultaneously.
A cron job to delete counter files older than seven days would be tidy.

Richard.Anderson at raycosoft.com
www.zipcon.net/~starfire/home (personal)
www.raycosoft.com (corporate)
----- Original Message -----
From: "jeff" <jeff at planetoid.net>
Cc: <spug-list at pm.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 2:23 PM
Subject: SPUG: slowing down a web form


> What's a good technique (using cgi and perl/apache/mysql) to slow down
> or control the number of times a form can be submitted per hour?
>
> I need to throttle down a membership application page on a web site to
> restrict the number of submissions or applications per hour to some
> number.
>
> I've heard that mod_simultaneous manages hit rates to web pages but I
> haven't used it before. So...
>
> Any ideas.
>
> --
> Jeff Saenz
> jeff at planetoid.net
>
>
>
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