Re: 403 - Forbidden on gitweb pages

<p dir="ltr"><br /> On Feb 14, 2013 1:35 AM, "Dave Page" <<a
href="mailto:dpage@pgadmin.org">dpage@pgadmin.org</a>>wrote:<br /> ><br /> ><br /> ><br /> > On
Thursday,February 14, 2013, Alvaro Herrera wrote:<br /> >><br /> >> Tom Lane wrote:<br /> >> >
Everyso often (a few percent of the time, I think) I get "403 -<br /> >> > Forbidden" from following a link on
<ahref="http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/">http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/</a>.<br /> >> > So far, a reload
hasalways worked first time, but there's definitely<br /> >> > something fishy in there.  I don't recall
exactlywhen this started<br /> >> > happening, maybe a month or so back; it hasn't been there all along.<br />
>>><br /> >> > Anybody else see this, or have an idea what broke?<br /> >><br /> >> Yes,
Isee this also.  I reported it to Magnus, who muttered something<br /> >> about Varnish possibly misbehaving, but
thatwas the end of it.<br /> >><br /> ><br /> > He told me it was intentional rate limiting, applied
becausegitweb is so inefficient.<br /><p dir="ltr">Correct. And varnish is not involved at all. I think alvaro is
confusingit with me saying that varnish might be a way for us to actually fix the problem. <p dir="ltr">The problem is
basicallythat gitweb is a big perl cgi (yes, cgi only) which means that for every request it had to reload all of perl
andreparse the whole script. And on top of that the actual implementation of several features is fairly slow in itself.
<pdir="ltr">This caused easy overload - for example the whole site went down when a search engine spidered us... <br
/><pdir="ltr">The bandaid solution was to rate limit access per ip. The error you hit is when you're rate limited. <p
dir="ltr">Now,I was supposed to have on my to do list to make a better fix. But as this one was implemented a long time
ago(measured in years, really, I have to admit I forgot... I'll put bit back on the list. <p dir="ltr">/Magnus