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Rate limit test: will your server block a crawler burst?

Group A3 pointsrubric r1

We fetch your homepage five times in a row and record the status codes. Any 403, or two or more 429 responses, fails the check.

Why it matters

An agent answering a question often loads several pages within a few seconds. A strict rate limit turns the second or third request into a 429 or 403, and the agent finishes its answer from the pages it did get, which is incomplete. A single 429 in the burst earns partial credit.

How to fix it

  1. Raise the per-IP limit for cacheable GET requests to at least 10 per second.
  2. Return 429 with a Retry-After header rather than 403, so a client can back off.
  3. Serve public pages from a CDN cache, which does not count against origin limits.
  4. Check WAF rules that block an IP after a few identical requests.

How to verify

Run for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} " https://example.com/; done and expect five 200s.

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