Thanks for all your work on this one, Karsten, and I hope you had a good nap. :) mod_throttle looks like it will stop a DOS from one client effectively, though the configuration is a bit complex for just that use of it. I plan to implement it for that. It doesn't appear to be useful though for the type of DDOS that seems to be brewing (which I hope fizzles and dies). The traffic pattern I was seeing (one request every 1.5 minutes) means it would take 45 attackers to tie up a stock Apache indefinitely. If this was implemented as a nimda-like worm, using random IP scanning, and it attacked as found servers, I think there would be a pretty good chance of defending against it (firewall the ip if there are n number of timeouts in a time period). If it did discovery first, though, and kept a cache (I'm not going to throw a flag on someone looking for my /index.html) then attacked at a predetermined time I can't think of a way to defend against it with a per-IP configuration. I'd probably never set my per-IP limit below 5, and this would use 3.33 connections per IP. If, however, Apache had a limit on 'barely-open connections' with some sort of timeout function, I think that would help. For instance, it might look like: BarelyOpenConnectionTimeout 10 BarelyOpenConnectionLimit 50 Such that if there were 50 connections open that hadn't sent a request for 10 seconds, it would stop dropping them in a FIFO manner. I mostly hack on higher-level modules in mod_perl, so I don't know enough about apache internals to speak to the feasibility of such a function. -Bill