>> To avoid this problem you could cap the number of "sluggish" >> responses at some figure, after which you simply fall back to regular >> 404 responses. Chris> All sounds cool, lot of work though ;-) Not really, though of course it depends on how motivated you are to solve the problem. ;-) You need a 404 handler which checks to see if the start of the requested path is on the no-no list. When the handler is called, it first checks the number of running threads. If the max has been reached or exceeded, shoot back a 404 and return. Otherwise, increment the running threads counter, snooze for awhile, then redirect to the next path in the chain. If you're fronting Zope with Apache or Squid I suspect it would be worth checking to see if they already implement something similar. You could easily do something with mod_rewrite, though I'm not too sure about the thread counter business. You'd probably just bump up against the maximum number of httpd processes (in which case you _would_ have a DOS attack). Skip