How to Throttle HTTP Requests in Chrome
Published By thechromesource Editorial Team
A new feature has arrived in Chrome 12 that allows you to throttle HTTP requests. Reducing your requests might be helpful when a site is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. When this happens, the affected website is getting overloaded with HTTP requests. This feature, which is currently not enabled by default, can identify when a DDoS attack is occurring and limit the browser’s requests to four.
You can access this feature by entering in “chrome://net-internals/#httpThrottling”. You’ll get a nice explanation of what this option does along with a check box.
“In order to prevent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from being perpetrated by web pages and extensions that run within Chrome, the HTTP throttling mechanism keeps track of errors requesting a given URL (minus the query parameters), and after a few 5xx errors in a row, starts exponentially increasing an interval during which requests to the given URL are disallowed.
You may enable or disable the feature below. Please let us know if the feature is causing problems for your web site. More details and contact information at http://dev.chromium.org/throttling.”
DDos attacks are a serious problem for websites, especially those that are important for infrastructure, commerce, and ad serving. I’ve noticed lately that a number of banking-related entities have been having a problem with such attacks. In order to safeguard against a number of Chrome browsers being the culprit, Google is including this feature. There’s no timeline as to when this option will be enabled by default.