Currently, Discourse rate limits all incoming requests by the IP address they
originate from regardless of the user making the request. This can be
frustrating if there are multiple users using Discourse simultaneously while
sharing the same IP address (e.g. employees in an office).
This commit implements a new feature to make Discourse apply rate limits by
user id rather than IP address for users at or higher than the configured trust
level (1 is the default).
For example, let's say a Discourse instance is configured to allow 200 requests
per minute per IP address, and we have 10 users at trust level 4 using
Discourse simultaneously from the same IP address. Before this feature, the 10
users could only make a total of 200 requests per minute before they got rate
limited. But with the new feature, each user is allowed to make 200 requests
per minute because the rate limits are applied on user id rather than the IP
address.
The minimum trust level for applying user-id-based rate limits can be
configured by the `skip_per_ip_rate_limit_trust_level` global setting. The
default is 1, but it can be changed by either adding the
`DISCOURSE_SKIP_PER_IP_RATE_LIMIT_TRUST_LEVEL` environment variable with the
desired value to your `app.yml`, or changing the setting's value in the
`discourse.conf` file.
Requests made with API keys are still rate limited by IP address and the
relevant global settings that control API keys rate limits.
Before this commit, Discourse's auth cookie (`_t`) was simply a 32 characters
string that Discourse used to lookup the current user from the database and the
cookie contained no additional information about the user. However, we had to
change the cookie content in this commit so we could identify the user from the
cookie without making a database query before the rate limits logic and avoid
introducing a bottleneck on busy sites.
Besides the 32 characters auth token, the cookie now includes the user id,
trust level and the cookie's generation date, and we encrypt/sign the cookie to
prevent tampering.
Internal ticket number: t54739.
Before this change, calling `StyleSheet::Manager.stylesheet_details`
for the first time resulted in multiple queries to the database. This is
because the code was modelled in a way where each `Theme` was loaded
from the database one at a time.
This PR restructures the code such that it allows us to load all the
theme records in a single query. It also allows us to eager load the
required associations upfront. In order to achieve this, I removed the
support of loading multiple themes per request. It was initially added
to support user selectable theme components but the feature was never
completed and abandoned because it wasn't a feature that we thought was
worth building.
`/srv/status` routes should not be cached at all. Also, we want to
decouple the route from Redis which `AnonymouseCache` relies on. The
`/srv/status` should continue to return a success response even if Redis
is down.
When the server gets overloaded and lots of requests start queuing server
will attempt to shed load by returning 429 errors on background requests.
The client can flag a request as background by setting the header:
`Discourse-Background` to `true`
Out-of-the-box we shed load when the queue time goes above 0.5 seconds.
The only request we shed at the moment is the request to load up a new post
when someone posts to a topic.
We can extend this as we go with a more general pattern on the client.
Previous to this change, rate limiting would "break" the post stream which
would make suggested topics vanish and users would have to scroll the page
to see more posts in the topic.
Server needs this protection for cases where tons of clients are navigated
to a topic and a new post is made. This can lead to a self inflicted denial
of service if enough clients are viewing the topic.
Due to the internal security design of Discourse it is hard for a large
number of clients to share a channel where we would pass the full post body
via the message bus.
It also renames (and deprecates) triggerNewPostInStream to triggerNewPostsInStream
This allows us to load a batch of new posts cleanly, so the controller can
keep track of a backlog
Co-authored-by: Joffrey JAFFEUX <j.jaffeux@gmail.com>
- Define the CSP based on the requested domain / scheme (respecting force_https)
- Update EnforceHostname middleware to allow secondary domains, add specs
- Add URL scheme to anon cache key so that CSP headers are cached correctly
This commit introduces 2 features:
1. DISCOURSE_COMPRESS_ANON_CACHE (true|false, default false): this allows
you to optionally compress the anon cache body entries in Redis, can be
useful for high load sites with Redis that lives on a separate server to
to webs
2. DISCOURSE_ANON_CACHE_STORE_THRESHOLD (default 2), only pop entries into
redis if we observe them more than N times. This avoids situations where
a crawler can walk a big pile of topics and store them all in Redis never
to be used. Our default anon cache time for topics is only 60 seconds. Anon
cache is in place to avoid the "slashdot" effect where a single topic is
hit by 100s of people in one minute.
This allows custom plugins such as prometheus exporter to log how many
requests are stored in the anon cache vs used by the anon cache.
This metric allows us to fine tune cache behaviors
Since 5bfe051e, Discourse user agents are marked as non-crawlers (to avoid accidental blacklisting). This makes sure pageviews for these agents are tracked as crawler hits.
* Phase 0 for user-selectable theme components
- Drops `key` column from the `themes` table
- Drops `theme_key` column from the `user_options` table
- Adds `theme_ids` (array of ints default []) column to the `user_options` table and migrates data from `theme_key` to the new column.
- Removes the `default_theme_key` site setting and adds `default_theme_id` instead.
- Replaces `theme_key` cookie with a new one called `theme_ids`
- no longer need Theme.settings_for_client
This refinement of previous fix moves the crawler blocking into
anonymous cache
This ensures we never poison the cache incorrectly when blocking crawlers
If "logged in" is being forced anonymous on certain routes, trigger
the protection for any requests that spend 50ms queueing
This means that ...
1. You need to trip it by having 3 requests take longer than 1 second in 10 second interval
2. Once tripped, if your route is still spending 50m queueuing it will continue to be protected
This means that site will continue to function with almost no delays while it is scaling up to handle the new load
If a particular path is being hit extremely hard by logged on users,
revert to anonymous cached view.
This will only come into effect if 3 requests queue for longer than 2 seconds
on a *single* path.
This can happen if a URL is shared with the entire forum base and everyone
is logged on
instead implement an aggressive anonymous cache that is stored in redis
this cache is sitting in the front of the middleware stack enabled only in production
TODO: expire it more intelligently when stuff is created
