i'm in the middle of learning the basics of deployment of a simple weather web app using VM, flask, Nginx and gunicorn. i've been told to limit the amount of connections from the same ip address to 5. meaning - i would like that each ip client could open only 5 connections to my site. according to this link: Manual for limiting number of connections
i'm supposed to add this line in the http part:
limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=limitconnbyaddr:20m;
then add this line to my location block:
limit_conn limitconnbyaddr 5;
and afterwards, of course, test nginx, restart the service and check myself. my question is: how can i check myself? i can't figure out a way to test if my actions were good or not. (BTW, if i'm wrong - i'd like to have a good explanation to the correct way to solve it, if anyone can) the website is made using python (as flask mentioned above)
A quick tool to test rate limit scenarios is siege. Assuming you're using Debian-base distributions, install it using:
sudo apt-get install siege
Usage:
# -v - verbose logging
# -r 2 - run two tests
# -c 5 - open 5 concurrent connections
siege -v -r 2 -c 5 http://localhost:8080/static/img/logo.png
Sample output (the failed requests will appear in red):
** SIEGE 4.0.7
** Preparing 5 concurrent users for battle.
The server is now under siege...
HTTP/1.1 200 0.84 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.96 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 1.02 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 1.02 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 1.02 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.92 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.93 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.90 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.96 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
HTTP/1.1 200 0.97 secs: 84987 bytes ==> GET /static/img/logo.png
Transactions: 10 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 1.99 secs
Data transferred: 0.81 MB
Response time: 0.95 secs
Transaction rate: 5.03 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.41 MB/sec
Concurrency: 4.79
Successful transactions: 10
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 1.02
Shortest transaction: 0.84
Sidenote: if the verbose format (-v) still shows you a JSON output, edit the siege configuration file (located at ~/.siege/siege.conf) and set the json_output directive to false; this should solve the issue.