[Koha] Slowness & outages

[Mark Alexander]

One of the Koha installations I manage has run into the slowdown
problem a couple of times.  This is on a Linode VPS, not using
CloudFlare.  In each case I logged into the server and used top
to see that Koha was the process taking up all the CPU.

Then I looked at this Apache log:

/var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log

This showed me that it was web crawlers out of control and ignoring
robots.txt.  Using the IP addresses from the logs, I blocked them
using iptables, e.g.:

iptables -A INPUT -s 47.76.209.138 -j DROP

I realize this is not a permanent solution, but it worked for
us because we don't run into this problem very often.  I'd
have to come up with something better if this were a frequent
occurrence.


-- 
What should I do if my problems aren't
all solved before I die? --Ashleigh Brilliant