Huge amount of empty requests

[reply]

I was just looking at my traffic and wondering why a small toy store in Australia would be getting a gigantic amount of “empty requests” (in the millions)

All comments appreciated

[sandro]

What is an “empty request”? Can you post a screenshot?

[reply]

thanks for asking, here is the screen shot

[sandro]

Alright, that would indicate your server is not sending a content type for most requests (my guess would be for HTML). Thats something you’d need to check on your end though. Whats the URL?

Whether a million requests over 24 hours is realistic for your site however is something only you could say.

[reply]

Hi Sandro, thanks for getting back to me, according to Google Analytics I get on average 900 users a day, The site is www.jadremtoys.com.au

I wish I had a million paying customers a day, that’s a lot of toys

Cheers

[Judge]

Chances are these are just CURL/non-browser requests. Google Analytics reports via browsers’ javascript, so if no javascript is running on the browser you won’t get a google analytics visit number.

In general, if your server isn’t dying and it’s still working for regular requests, you shouldn’t need to do this. If you experience higher load times or TTFB, consider either “high” or “i’m under attack” security level.

[reply]

Thanks for getting back to me, speed is fine, ttfb is around the 200 mark and the pages I’ve tested are loading around 1-2 seconds. The server logs don’t show anything out of the ordinary.

I was just blow away by the amount of showing in the report.

Cheers

[sandro]

As @Judge already mentioned, Google Analystics is fully reliant on JavaScript and on actually being executed. If either of them is not true a genuine visitor wont be counted. However, to be fair, this most likely wont be the case in the majority of your visitors.

We have two apparent issues here, one is that your server is not sending the right content type. This is the reason why Cloudflare refers to “empty requests” and is not necessarily something you have to fix, but it might still be a good idea.
The other issue is the large number of requests. As mentioned earlier, if this does not create any problems for your or your site you could just ignore it, however if you still want to block them you should best analyse the log files on your server.

[reply]

Thanks I’ll look into it and see what’s happening