[iamwpj]

We have been suffering this. It's easy enough to weather high traffic loads for pages, but our issue is targeted applications. Things like website search bars are getting target with functional searches for sub pages and content by labels, etc. It causes the web server to run out of handles for the pending database lookups.

A real mess. The problem is these searches are valid and the page will return a 200 result with "Nothing in that search found!" types of messages. Why would the crawler ever stop? It's going to work and work until we all die and there's still another epoch of search term combos left to try.

We solve problems like this all the time, but we're hitting another level and really exposing some issues. Ideally our WAF can start to kick the traffic. It's good to see other people having this issue. We first started addressing this last fall -- around November.