The Overload Protection is available since Smartstore v6 and can be found in the Settings under the Performance tab.

This is a powerful feature that ensures system stability and performance even under heavy load. It protects against overloading of server resources, prevents latency spikes, and keeps the platform functional even during sudden bursts of load, such as advertising campaigns, unexpected traffic spikes, or bot attacks. Overload protection focuses on managing and limiting access for guest users and bots, while exempting registered users from restrictions. With flexible time windows and thresholds for different user groups, you can effectively manage both long-term streams of visitors and short-term peaks. This feature provides a customized way to improve the user experience and ensure platform availability.

Typical use cases:

• Defense against “bad bots”

• Manage sudden user spikes (e.g. due to sales events)

• Protect against performance drops due to unexpectedly high traffic

A key problem addressed by overload protection is the mass creation of guest accounts by unidentifiable "bad bots". These bots often evade traditional identification mechanisms by refusing to accept cookies and creating new sessions for each request. While overload protection cannot completely prevent this, it can effectively mitigate it by limiting the number of new accounts per time window and reducing unnecessary system load. In particular, blocking new guests for secondary requests such as AJAX or script requests prevents bots from overloading the system.

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Overload Protection - Configuration

General Settings

Traffic Limit (Long Term Monitoring)

With these settings, thresholds can be configured over a longer period of time (e.g., one minute or longer).

Peak (Short Term Monitoring)

These settings become effective during sudden traffic peaks over a very short period of time (e.g. a few seconds).