Limiting Connections and Bandwidth

If you are providing hosting services for several clients, you may face the situation where one of your clients' websites is degrading the performance of the service as a whole. This may be because the website was linked from a high traffic news page (the so-called "Slashdot effect") or because it is hosting a popular set of music or video files. There are a number of Apache modules that allow you to measure and control bandwidth and number of connections, to make sure the impact on other customers and the server as a whole is kept to a minimum. Throttling in this context usually means slowing down the delivery of content based on the file requested, a specific client IP address, the number of simultaneous requests, and so on.

The mod_bandwidth Apache 1.3 module enables the setting of server-wide or per-connection bandwidth limits, based on the specific directory, size of files, and remote IP/domain.

http://www.cohprog.com/mod_bandwidth.html

The bandwidth share module provides bandwidth throttling and balancing by client IP address. It supports Apache 1.3 and earlier versions of Apache 2.

http://www.topology.org/src/bwshare/README.html

The mod_throttle module throttles bandwidth per virtual host or user, for Apache 1.3.

http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/index.shtml

The Robotcop module helps you prevent spiders from accessing parts of their sites they have marked off limits.

http://www.robotcop.org/

mod_require_host allows you to restrict access to those clients (such as many IIS worms) that do not provide a host header and just try to connect to your IP address

http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_require_host/index.shtml

mod_choke is a module for Apache that limits usage by the number of concurrent connections per IP, and limits the rate at which apache sends data to the client.

http://os.cyberheatinc.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=7

mod_tsunami allows you to limit the number of Apache children per virtual host.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-tsunami/