...
GSOC works well for older University students, but requires a fair amount of open source knowledge to start with. What can we do to help get 1st and 2nd year University students involved in Open Source, ready to be the future group of GSOC students?
Enforcing fair utilization of httpd servers
Many sites are concerned with contention and scarce resources, and have restored to limiting the number of concurrent connections per IP, or throttling the bandwidth. These have the disadvantage of blocking groups of users behind NATs, and consuming an excessive number of request workers as the response bodies are delayed. In partnership with the European Patent Office, this solution developed by William Rowe leverages mod_usage_track to identify individual users' requests over a small sliding window of time, and mod_rewrite to informatively and efficiently deny further use of server resources until that user's activity over time has returned to a fair level.