Solutions to Ease the DDOS Trickle-Down Effect?

dealsites asks: "Recently, The Electorial Vote website run by Andrew Tanenbaum was hit with a triple-threat. Not only was it Slashdotted, it was hit with a DDOS attack in conjunction with the busiest normal traffic day, due to the election. Netcraft has an article detailing the steps taken to mitigate the traffic. Andrew's host provider is also the provider of my site. I'm sure were are on separate servers, him a dedicated server and semi-dedicated hardware for myself, but I noticed dramatic slowdowns of my site during this triple-threat traffic onslaught to Andrew's site. Are there any techniques other than throwing more CPUs and bandwidth at the problem to remedy this type of situation? I'm sure I can't be the only one that has noticed this. Any comments on other similar stories?"

Not to advertise

[ebrandsberg]

But the company I work for provides products that help in situations like this, although pre-planning for such events is critical for surges like this to be handled cleanly. For anybody interested, check out http://www.netscaler.com/ [netscaler.com] for information. Some key things to look for:

1) That your upstream provider has sufficient capacity to handle large surges in traffic to one part of their infrastructure
2) If you expect to receive a large surge, to overprovision your upstream links
3) Make sure to have a front-end device that can determine "legitimate" traffic from bad traffic such as syn floods, and deal with the capacity of the upstream links.
4) Make sure you have the ability to cache hot content in case you max out your servers if you need too. You don't need to regenerate a page of voting information with every request if it only changes ever few minutes, cache it to reduce the server load.

In many cases, people fail to insure they have enough bandwidth on their upstream connections, and then put firewalls on the other side of the connection. Firewalls will tend to die under a heavy syn flood, and if they don't if you don't have enough capacity, it won't help anyway.

Site is under attack currently...

[stienman]

From the main page of electoralvote2.com:

All the servers appear to be under attack now, also DNS. I added another large multiprocessor but it doesn't seem to help much. I don't this is going to work. Sorry.

The remainder have older messages on them - not sure how or if they are being automatically synced.

Bummer, but kindof expected. Seems that he's using only one provider...

-Adam

File size

[jm92956n]

If you know you're about to get hit, minimize the graphics and streamline the code; this guy's got a page that's just over 30 kb (including graphics). Provided the page isn't generated dynamically, it shouldn't be too tough for a decent server to handle.

Throw in some flash and a bunch of fancy images and you've got a recipe for disaster.