Since mid of February our webtraffic is at least 2 times higher than usual. Even if paused, Cloudflare servers are continually accessing our webserver.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Wolfgang
Hello,
Have you tried to take a look at your caching analytics dashboard?
Cache Analytics · Cloudflare Cache (CDN) docs.
This will help you to analyze what requests are not being cached that are reaching your origin server. As every time we do not have a cached asset we will query the origin server directly. This analytics can show you what is not being cached. So you can try to create rules to cache these assets. Which will in turn reduce web traffic.
It could also be that you are being attacked. I would review the spikes in traffic in this graph to verify they are not unwanted requests.
After some more investigations it turned out that the high traffic started slowly on mid of February - normally we had about 500MB/day and now we have 3GB/day. The traffic stops after around 30 minutes when pausing Cloudflare.
I’ve enabled ‘under attack’ mode, added a cache rule for the host and enabled tiered cache - nothing changed.
What I don’t understand is that the traffic page displays 1.3k unique visitors per day. However, on the web analytics page total visits is listed with around 150/day. The latter is more realistic - where does the difference come from?
Is it possibly that the traffic is caused by a Cloudflare update?
Thanks
Traffic peak can be a signal of an attack. Or maybe if you are running a sales/marketing campaign.
If it’s an attack, you can check your Security Events and enforce security rules such as WAF, Rate Limiting.
If you are proxy, make sure it’s cached on Cloudflare. You can read more at Default Cache Behavior · Cloudflare Cache (CDN) to understand what is cached and what is not cached on Cloudflare by default.
You can also override the cache with Page Rules & Cache Rules.
The analytics provided on the Cloudflare dashboard and GraphQL Analytics API are based on a sample — a subset of the dataset. In these cases, Cloudflare Analytics returns an estimate derived from the sampled value. For example, suppose that during an attack the sampling rate is 10% and 5,000 events are sampled. Cloudflare will estimate 50,000 total events (5,000 × 10) and report this value in Analytics.
You can read more at Sampling · Cloudflare Analytics docs.
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