Every once in a while, some doofus points a web crawler at our web site and, ignoring the disallowed areas in our robots.txt file, starts crawling through some of our cgi-bin scripts at a rate of 4 to 8 hits a second. This is particularly annoying with some of the more processor and disk intensive CGI programs, such as man2html, which also happens to generate lots of links back to itself.
Is there anything I can set up in Apache to throttle back and slow down remote hosts when they start hitting hard on cgi-bin? I don't want to do anything that would adversely affect legitimate users, nor make important things like the manual pages hard to find by removing any public links to them. But when a client starts making 10 or more GET requests on /cgi-bin in a 5 second period, it would be nice if I could get the server to progressively add longer and longer delays before servicing these requests, to keep the load down and prevent the server from thrashing.
I'd appreciate any tips.
Thanks, Gilles