Shane A. Stillwell
Throttle traffic with iptables

Throttle traffic with iptables

#Server Admin

Hold on Cowboy

This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. The Times They Are A-Changin'

I was having a problem with a particular virtual private server getting overrun by a surge in traffic (targeted?). So I decided to throttle the HTTP connections using iptables.

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name HTTP; /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 60 --hitcount 100 --rttl --name HTTP -j DROP

The first line just tags the new HTTP connections as HTTP. The second line gives the hitcount of 100. So if I get more than 100 HTTP requests a minute, then iptables will just drop the 101+ until the minute is over.

This has worked splendid on the site.