- From: Ted Guild <ted@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:30:30 -0400
- To: Sumit Shah <Sumit.Shah@cgifederal.com>
- Cc: www-talk@w3.org
Sumit, We are sending HTTP 503 and the content of the response also includes a link which expands to an article giving more background on this issue. http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic In the last 16 months since writing that article we have only seen this traffic increase and recently we are seeing surges in traffic that we cannot keep up with, neither our automated defenses nor manual intervention. Increasing server capacity sees the increased capacity just getting consumed as well. This is rendering our site overwhelmed and unresponsive for our working groups and the rest of the web community. > I was wondering if this is an isolated issue or something across the > board. Is this something intentional that W3 has done to block DTD > requests and is there a suggested fix for it? About 1/4th of our DTD traffic (in the hundreds of millions/day) is from Java so when trying to keep our site available yesterday responding 503 to this traffic was low hanging fruit. We will be monitoring this traffic and see when we can be less dramatic in our defenses. We have also identified another widely distributed application responsible for a substantial portion of this traffic, the vendor has acknowledged the issue and is working on a resolution which we hope will be released soon. Many libraries have catalog or caching options and lacking that one can get a caching proxy in front of their application making repeated DTD requests. -- Ted Guild <ted@w3.org> W3C Systems Team http://www.w3.org
Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 22:30:42 UTC