Who is Hammering My Site and Why?

[mkerr]

Hi,

I have a small very new 5 MB site, with only about 20-40 visitors per day.

Over the last 3 days, my bandwidth has suddenly jumped to almost 1GB / day.

I am not very familiar with awstats and webalyzer, but I turned them on to try and figure out what is happening.

It looks like a pretty well known corporate site is responsible for 85% of the hits. It looks like they are just reloading the basic pages over and over again.

Below are the stats from Webalyzer for that hostname. I have crossed out the hostname.

--
Hits: 6900 (84.28%)
Files: 16900 (87.97%)
KBytes: 681602 (94.77%)
Visits: 0 (0.00%)
Hostname: ---.---.---
--

One odd thing I notice is that the stats show 0 visits.

Basically, the only info I have is the above stat, the total daily bandwidth, and a stat showing that the majority of the bandwidth being used is comprised of just the basic images from the site's basic graphic design.

Does anyone have any ideas about what may be going on?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[stapel]

Without specific information, it's going to be difficult to come to any specific conclusions. But if the traffic is coming from a stable IP address (or range), you might want to try blocking in your .htaccess file.

Eliz.

[jfbeaulieu]

You can edit your log file manually since your site is small, and there is some likelyhood that it's a spider from the Netherland. Java/1.... (anything related to the version). It's a bot, but a savage one that used to ignore the robots.txt directives and downloaded anyone of my files. Well that's a possibility but it's certanly a bot.

[mkerr]

Thanks for your help.

I *think* I have figured out the problem. I had about 12 fairly small images which were rotating in an automated slideshow using Javascript.

The script was using full paths with the domain name to preload the images. This was a leftover from the development version.

I think this was creating a new request each time the image rotated, instead of the browser fetching the image from the cache.

The above behavior actually makes no sense to me, but the problem stopped as soon as I switched it to relative paths.

I noticed in the logs that the images had been loaded many thousands of times more than the pages, and Webalizer was showing 0 visits, so the only thing I could think of was that some machine was re-requesting the images every few seconds for a few days. Maybe someone just left their machine on with my site open?

Is this a possible scenario?