Since yesterday my server has again been getting absolutely obliterated by AI scrapers. This time, though, load is below 1, but I'm getting up to 10 requests a second and all of my Apache workers are in state "R". "apachectl restart" fixes it... for a while.
What levers do I have to pull on this? E.g. maybe it would be sensible to drop connections if they stay in "R" for more than a couple seconds?
This 12 year old post suggests some sysctl.conf changes, but I have...
https://jwz.org/b/yk0T