Hi,
We have our named servers pointing at Cloudflare. We have noticed recently that our server started getting a lot more activity. so much so that it has crashed several times now. Even as I speak its not up. The reason its down is that its getting hammered with requests. Google Analytics says we get about 40 unique visitors per day but Cloudflare Analytics say we are now up to 200k requests per day.
It looks like Cloudflare are the culprits but I’m not certain if this is true and if so, why?
We have recently improved the search engine indexing opportunities for some 4,000 static pages on our site, all derived from dynamic content. So we did expect some sort of hit from Cloudflare to cache all of this. But we didn’t expect activity prolonged in this way.
Any advise on ways to further tune our settings either on the server or Cloudflare would be greatly appreciated.
I also notice that a greater number of requests against our server are identified as ‘Uncached Requests’. This doesn’t fit at all and suggests the enquiries are external to Cloudflare.
@enquiries you’re not comparing apples to apples.
Unique visitors - each can generate many page loads
CF Requests - I don’t think each page load is a request, rather it’s every resource (image, css, etc).
So each Unique visitor can create 10 page loads of 50 requests each. 40x10x50 = 20,000 requests per day. x 7 = 140,000 per week. Still nowhere near the 800k you’re reporting though.
You may want to look at server logs to see what’s going on. Google Analytics is just for their data mining purposes… it’s not a good server diagnostic tool.
@ryan can you shed some light on what makes a cf ‘request’? Is it a page or any resource?
