Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Heya Danjela,
>
> Daniela Lura <danielaluraa@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Taking into consideration the suggestion made in this thread:
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-05/msg00096.html, my
>> mentor, Christopher Baines suggested me to write a script that serves a
>> search page for packages using the search functionality within the Guix
>> Data Service,
>> https://data.guix.gnu.org/repository/1/branch/master/latest-processed-revision/packages?search_query=git&field=version&field=synopsis&after_name=&limit_results=100
>> .
>>
>> The prototype page can be accessed through a test version of the Guix
>> website that Chris deployed:
>> http://guix-website-test.cbaines.net/packages/search
>
> Cool!  To be clear, guix-website-test actually makes a search query on a
> Data Service instance, right?  I guess that explains part of the
> slowness, but maybe we could tweak nginx to keep search results in cache
> for a few hours.
>
> Florian raised an important issue regarding the possibility of denial of
> service.  Ideas on how to mitigate that, either in the Data Service, or
> nginx at guix.gnu.org?

On this point specifically, I've used the rate limiting functionality in
NGinx before, and that's probably a low cost approach to guarding
against this. It's not going to stop a DDOS, but might help avoid lots
of requests from one IP address causing load issues.