"His mouse button must be stuck"

[Thomas Dowling]

Gentle Web4Libbers--

I've been trying to diagnose why one of our servers has recently shown a
dramatic upswing in server load,  and in the course of poring over log
files have run across a rare, but recurring and puzzling user behavior.

We have users who are requesting the same URLs from our servers
repeatedly.  And when I say repeatedly, I mean, for example, 20 times in
one minute, or 10 times in 15 seconds.  The requests come fast enough that
the server usually returns zero bytes before the next one comes in.  The
effect is as though a user were getting impatient, and clicking the same
link over and over, but with lightning speed.  As aptly phrased by a
vendor we had looking at the problem, "it looks like his mouse button is
stuck."  Except that it's not just one user.  And it always looks like a
normal set of requests up to this multiple request flurry.

On the server in question, almost all hits are Perl CGI scripts, so a big
part of our load problem may be abandoned Perl jobs.

Has anyone else seen this kind of activity in their logs?  Or better yet,
observed the user behavior that causes it?


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu