How to deal with excessive requests on heroku
Have your host based firewall throttle those requests. Depending on your setup, you can also add Nginx in to the mix, which can throttle requests too.
I am experiencing a once per 60-90 minute spike in traffic that's causing my Heroku app to slow to a crawl for the duration of the spike - NewRelic is reporting response times of 20-50 seconds per request, with 99% of that down to the Heroku router queuing requests up. The request count goes from an average of around 50-100rpm up to 400-500rpm
Looking at the logs, it looks to me like a scraping bot or spider trying to access a lot of content pages on the site. However it's not all coming from a single IP.
What can I do about it?
My sysadmin / devops skills are pretty minimal.
Guy