6. Administration

Once you have XTools up and running, depending on how much traffic you receive, you might want to implement measures to ensure stability.

6.1. Rate limiting

Rate limiting can safeguard against spider crawls and bots that overload the application.

To configure, set the following variables in parameters.yml:

  • app.rate_limit_time: 10 where 10 is the number of minutes app.rate_limit_count requests from the same user to the same URI are allowed.
  • app.rate_limit_count: 5 where 5 is the number of requests from the same user that are allowed during the time frame specified by app.rate_limit_time.

Using the above example, if you try to load the same page more than 5 times within 10 minutes, the request will be denied and you will have to wait 10 minutes before you can make the same request. This only applies to result pages and the API, and not index pages. Additionally, no rate limitations are imposed if the user is authenticated.

Any requests that are denied are logged at var/logs/rate_limit.log.

You can blacklist user agents and URIs using the request_blacklist.yml file.

6.2. Offloading API requests

XTools features a rich public API. In addition, the internal API used for the Edit Counter can be very expensive in terms of resources. If you expect your XTools installation will receive a lot of traffic, you might consider setting up a dedicated API server so that resources on the main app server are not hogged.

This documentation covers how to set up forwarding so that all requests to /api go to the API server, assuming you are using Apache in a Linux environment.

  1. Install libapache2-mod-proxy-html and libxml2-dev: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-proxy-html libxml2-dev
  2. Enable the necessary modules (if some are already enabled it will simply make sure they are active):
sudo a2enmod proxy
sudo a2enmod proxy_http
sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2enmod deflate
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo a2enmod proxy_balancer
sudo a2enmod proxy_connect
sudo a2enmod proxy_html
sudo a2enmod xml2enc
  1. In your Apache coniguration, within the <VirtualHost> block, add this to the bottom:
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass /api http://X.X.X.X:80/app.php/api
ProxyPassReverse /api http://X.X.X.X:80/app.php/api

…replacing X.X.X.X with the IP of the API server.

  1. Finally, restart apache with sudo apachectl -k graceful

6.3. Killing slow queries

Some queries on users with a high edit count may take a very long time to finish or even timout. You may wish to add a query killer to ensure stability.

If you are running on a Linux environment, consider using pt-kill. A query killer daemon could be configured like so:

pt-kill --user=xxxx --password=xxxx --host=xxxx \
       --busy-time=90 \
       --log /var/www/web/killed_slow_queries.txt \
       --match-info "^(select|SELECT|Select)" \
       --kill --print --daemonize --verbose

This will kill any SELECT query that takes over 90 seconds to finish, and log the query at /var/www/web/killed_slow_queries.txt.

Note that pt-kill requires libdbi-perl and libdbd-mysql-perl.