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                     JOURNAL FOR SUNDAY 9TH JANUARY, 2022
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SUBJECT: Reworked quota (rate limiting per IP address connections)
   DATE: Sun  9 Jan 19:44:29 GMT 2022

In my haste to get per IP address quota out I bungled the effort somewhat…

The code was hacked into the server source. Quota could expiring too soon due
to cache slots being of a fixed period and fractional slot times not being
taken into account — they are now.

So, a brilliant start to 2022 :(

I’ve since put quota into their own quota package and cleaned up the server
code. I’ve also reworked the quota code to iron out the initial bugs. Based on
feedback I have also added a Debug.Quota configuration option. If Debug.Quota
is set to true lines like the following will be written to the server log:


  QC[1  ] M[0000000000000000...0000000000000101 ] X[19:01:46] A[127.0.0.1]
  QC[2  ] M[0000000000000000...0000000000000111*] X[19:01:49] A[127.0.0.2]


The QC indicates a quota cache line and has a sequence number, starting at 1
for each report. The M value shows the 64bit slot mask, 0 is an unused slot
and 1 is a used slot. If the bits are followed by an asterisk ‘*’ the client
IP address shown in the A value is over quota and cannot connect. The X value
is the expiry time of the cache line.

It should be noted that the IP address in the A value is always reported, even
if Server.LogClient is set to false.

The quota implementation does not use timers or Go routines to watch for
expired quota. All house-keeping is performed automatically when a client
connects. Up to 1,000 expired quota can be purged from the cache at a time,
unless quota debugging is turned on — then the whole cache is checked. This
keeps the CPU overhead for enabling quota low. Purging expired quota keeps the
memory overhead of using quota low.

The new quota implementation is now out on the public dev branch.

Next I’m adding the #DEBUG command. Then I’ll be starting the groundwork for
combat by adding health and the HIT command I used for testing. I think that
will bring the new code up to par with the previous v0.0.18 release?

--
Diddymus


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