Denial of service protection settings

Use these settings to define denial of service protection for the proxy server. The buffer chunk sizes are used to provide protection against denial of service attacks. It is very important to tune these settings to balance the level of protection with the performance impacts that can be experienced.

From the admin console, click...

        Servers > Server Types > WebSphere proxy servers > server > HTTP Proxy Server Settings > Denial of service protection.

Maximum request body buffer chunk size

This field sets the maximum amount of the request body data that is buffered in memory before it is sent. The proxy server and secured proxy server can buffer multiple network reads of a Transfer-Encoding: chunked request body before performing a network write. This can improve performance because buffering the data will decrease the number of network writes required for large payloads. This field should be adjusted with caution. If the buffer size is set too high, memory exhaustion, which is a common intent of denial of service attacks, might be experienced. You will need to test different buffer sizes to find the optimal level of balance between protection and performance for our system. The default value of this field is 32 kilobytes.

Maximum response body buffer chunk size

This field sets the maximum amount of the response body data that is buffered in memory before it is sent. The proxy server and secured proxy server can buffer multiple network reads of a Transfer-Encoding: chunked response body before performing a network write. This can improve performance because buffering the data will decrease the number of network writes required for large payloads. This field should be adjusted with caution. If the buffer size is set too high, memory exhaustion, which is a common intent of denial of service attacks, might be experienced. You will need to test different buffer sizes to find the optimal level of balance between protection and performance for our system. The default value of this field is 32 kilobytes.

Related:

Configure denial of service protection for the proxy server