Dawn of the Geeks

Godaddy has some quirks. One of those quirks is that it will block a client if too many requests are made in too little time. Now, I suppose that takes care of most DDOS attacks but what I was doing was making a few dozen requests within a few seconds and suddenly I’m getting an HTTP 408 error which means the connection has timed out. That’s an odd error considering it came back in no time at all.

Changing the user agent on my curl script would sometimes work. I think what it was is that I had to change the user agent to something valid and wait a few minutes to avoid being instantly blocked again. But that doesn’t solve the problem.

The solution to this problem was actually pretty simple. I make a single request to dawnofthegeeks.com to get the list of stock symbols that need to be updated. I then make the requests to finance.yahoo.com to get the information for those symbols. I then put all of the data into a single string, base64 encode it and send it up all at once to dawnofthegeeks. Now, I’ve made 2 requests in a short time instead of dozens.

We’ll see if this continues to work or if the script gets blocked again.