The new maintenance page is great! But the links on it should be disabled for non logged-in users so that web spiders don't exercise the high-overhead functions on the maintenance page, bogging down the server.
For anoymous IPs they should probably just return a message like "You must be logged in to use this function: please click here to create an account."
Speculation: Could this be the reason for the recent outage?
Neil
On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 10:28:00AM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
The new maintenance page is great! But the links on it should be disabled for non logged-in users so that web spiders don't exercise the high-overhead functions on the maintenance page, bogging down the server.
This might be better handled with robots.txt...
Khendon wrote:
On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 10:28:00AM +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
The new maintenance page is great! But the links on it should be disabled for non logged-in users so that web spiders don't exercise the high-overhead functions on the maintenance page, bogging down the server.
This might be better handled with robots.txt...
I'd do both. Robots.txt only keeps out well-behaved robots, but it's the badly-behaved robots that cause most real trouble. And if they are badly behaved enough to hammer links, they are probably also badly behaved enough to ignore robots.txt.
Neil
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