php POST request takes my server down - help !!

[student]

One account hosted by my server sends POST request that is overloading server resources and finally takes it down :/ Really have no idea what to do to prevent this killing POST request :/

I wrote script that logs apache-status when load average is greater than 20, and the apache dump before system got totally overloaded is showing lots of entries like that:

46-2  ...  125.26 434.91 65.254.224.36   some_domain.com  POST /add.php HTTP/1.1

So it seems that some user send request using POST method to write some data to database, but why there's lots of the the same POST requestes (from the same IP to the same web using the same script) in the apache-status? Im guesssing that there's problem with bad written php script.

Is there any method to prevent that POST requests from taking my server down?
Maybe they're some limits to POST requests - time, database, resource limits or anything that can help me with this killing POST request ...

I really appreciate any help, the problem is very serious :/

 

[rhenderson]

I can't specifically help you, but I can tell you we had a similar problem and it was causing a huge file to be written in /tmp, once /tmp was filled then this basically caused errors for everything else, in essence it would shut us down. We suspended the customers account after failing to respond to emails from us.

I will agree it is most likely a poorly written script.