Hello everybody!

I have a question regarding the number of petitions that gets send by LS to the server. We have installed LS 3.15.8 on a commercial hosting provider. Editing our survey we regularly get kicked out by the firewall of our provider due to a too high number of petitions to the server from the same IP. It seems the the limit set by our provider is 5000 petitions per day per IP.

Since our hosting provider is not able/willing to make changes to their general firewall settings, my question is, if anybody can suggest ways to tweak the number of petitions on the LS client side? Any ideas or suggestions? Anybody had the same problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks!

usr764783 wrote: Editing our survey we regularly get kicked out by the firewall of our provider due to a too high number of petitions to the server from the same IP. It seems the the limit set by our provider is 5000 petitions per day per IP.

How is "petition" defined? You will need to provide some infos about the firewall and the provider as well.
The reasoning for the blocking and possible workarounds will depend on the technical details.

Editing our survey we regularly get kicked out by the firewall of our provider due to a too high number of petitions to the server from the same IP.

I have never heard of something like this before. I don't know how intensive you work on this questionnaire and with how many people. But I never ran in any of these troubles on any hosting platform that I used and I also have never heard something like that in the forum. Seems to be very specific to your hosting company.

I would define as petition the output when looking at the Web-developer Network panel in Firefox for example. I don't have any information about the actual firewall. The only information we get from the provider is the listing of the IPs that access our LS install and the number of petitions which in some cases is higher than 5000.

Do you suggest that we can tweak the number of petitions send to the server when you load for example the page to edit a question in LS? That's the only possibility I see, for example, an internal caching mechanism in LS which would allow to reduce the number of petitions?

As I said, we don't have access to the firewall configuration nor are the technicians of our provider willing to change the configuration of their firewall.

5000 "petitions" sounds a lot, but depending on what counts as a petition (e.g. every element on the website? Every MySQL call?) you might run into that limit quite quickly if you have a lot of images, css and javascript files, etc. on a page. But as Jelo says, without knowing what exactly is counted as a "petition" and what your use case is, it is difficult to say something.

usr764783 wrote: Do you suggest that we can tweak the number of petitions send to the server when you load for example the page to edit a question in LS?

The amount of information provided is not enough to analyze the case. What is the name of the provider and what kind of hosting package is used?

Current suggestion: Change provider or change survey tool.

Following usr764783's definition you were only able to open about 120 pages.
Only refreshing this page uses about 40-50 of these "petitions".

I am sure your provider has a different definition of this.

Joffm

holch wrote: 5000 "petitions" sounds a lot, but depending on what counts as a petition (e.g. every element on the website? Every MySQL call?)

I never heard "Petitions"in combination with firewalls or internet connections.

You have connections or requests.
LimeSurvey is mostly using "web requests" https and http.
Depending on the setup of the webserver and the browser version, these requests can differ a lot.
If e.g. http2 can be used between webserver and browser the amount of requests is lower.

medium.com/@factoryhr/http-2-the-differe...-use-it-38094fa0e95b

So without changing any line of code inside LimeSurvey, the amount of requests can be reduced.


As long as the reasoning of the 5000 limit is not challenged, nothing will changed.

Thanks jelo for this info. We will look into that!

To provide more information as requested, our hosting provider and plan is the following: www.cdmon.com/en/servers/virtual-servers

We have the basic configuration for a virtual server.

I figure the way they count the requests per IP is through the number of entires in the Apache access log - which then really includes all graphics, javascript files, etc. etc. when loading a LS page.

I don't think the support told you the correct reason for blocking.

I see no infos about a certain limit, but I see a FAQ entry about a WAF (mod security).
ticket.cdmon.com/es/support/solutions/ar...caci%C3%B3n-web-waf-

ticket.cdmon.com/es/support/solutions/ar...idad-de-aplicaciones

Try to deactivate that WAF and check if your IP get blocked.
Depending on the rules of the WAF, LimeSurvey will trigger certain rules and your IP get blocked.