Answers.Body: <p>It isn't a process it's a function in the drupal module. It mostly gets called when a web request comes in. Check your apache logs for a large number of requests, maybe your site was hit by a botnet. At least the logs would tell you IPs.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2016-07-05T16:26:46.523Z
Answers.Text: Follow up info: Microsoft's BingBot decided to slaughter our site from no fewer than 12 different IP addresses. It doesn't get to do that any more. :)
Answers.UserDisplayName: Jonathan Leistiko
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2016-06-21T19:07:58.373Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2016-06-21T19:07:58.373Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Demerit
Body: <p>Earlier today, the civicrm_invoke process submitted a large number of requests to our server – so many requests that it took our site down. An agent at our host (Pantheon) had to restart our application instance to get our site back on-line.</p>
  
  <p>My goal is to prevent this from happening again. To do that, I need to better understand why this happened, so I'm turning to y'all for some guidance:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>What is civicrm_invoke?</li>
  <li>What causes it to instantiate?</li>
  <li>If there are obvious possible causes for a (seemingly) spontaneous "burst" of civicrm_invoke requests, what are they?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>We're on a virtual server on Pantheon, running CiviCRM 4.7.8, Drupal 7.44, PHP 5.5.24. Our database is: 5.5.5-10.0.23-MariaDB-log. No extensions are installed. Cron has not run since April 18th (Yes, that's a problem. No, I don't know how I managed to get it to run in April. If anyone can point me at a way to manually force Civi's Cron to run, that'd be keen.).</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
Tags: <error>
Title: What would cause civicrm_invoke to submit a large number of server requests?
ThreadText: # What would cause civicrm_invoke to submit a large number of server requests?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2016-06-21)
  
  Earlier today, the civicrm\_invoke process submitted a large number of requests to our server – so many requests that it took our site down. An agent at our host (Pantheon) had to restart our application instance to get our site back on-line.
  
  My goal is to prevent this from happening again. To do that, I need to better understand why this happened, so I'm turning to y'all for some guidance:
  
  * What is civicrm\_invoke?
  * What causes it to instantiate?
  * If there are obvious possible causes for a (seemingly) spontaneous "burst" of civicrm\_invoke requests, what are they?
  
  We're on a virtual server on Pantheon, running CiviCRM 4.7.8, Drupal 7.44, PHP 5.5.24. Our database is: 5.5.5-10.0.23-MariaDB-log. No extensions are installed. Cron has not run since April 18th (Yes, that's a problem. No, I don't know how I managed to get it to run in April. If anyone can point me at a way to manually force Civi's Cron to run, that'd be keen.).
  
  Thanks!
  
  **Tags:** error
  
  
  ---
  
  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2016-06-21. Score: 1 | Accepted answer
  
  It isn't a process it's a function in the drupal module. It mostly gets called when a web request comes in. Check your apache logs for a large number of requests, maybe your site was hit by a botnet. At least the logs would tell you IPs.
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_0**: Follow up info: Microsoft's BingBot decided to slaughter our site from no fewer than 12 different IP addresses. It doesn't get to do that any more. :)  
  
  ---
  
  