Callback hitting hard

Server NGINX
1

Hello,

I am facing a problem on a website which has been using AJAX callbacks
to
report JS errors.
It seems there has been sth wrong going on and a tremendous number of
errors are being reported through the callback.
You could say the website owner crafted it own DDoS vector.

Errors collection has been deactivated and our cache purged so new
visitors
are unaffected.
However it seems an old version of the cache is stored somewhere in a
specific network since its gateway is responsible for a huge amount of
requests.

The question is:

  • Knowing the current version of the page is OK
  • Knowing we isolated the callback calls (POST, not cached) in nginx to
    alleviate the pain previously inflicted to the backends

Is there a way (HTTP Status code?) to tell the page making these
callbacks
to refreh itself?

I was thinking about 205, but I am unsure if it means what I think it
does.
Does it merely clear forms and other types of user input in the page?
For now, We are serving 204, even though the JS script does not seem to
like it (requests volume increased, but nginx can handle without problem
of
course).
​The problem is now traffic volume…​

B. R.

2

I found a way to mitigate it, if anyone interested.

At first, I thought that trying to rate-limit would not provide results,
as
the JS callback could still retry, not caring about the returned code.
It seems sending 503 after rate limiting (not having allowed any queue
with
the ‘burst’ parameter) is enough.

B. R.