Currently, Discourse rate limits all incoming requests by the IP address they
originate from regardless of the user making the request. This can be
frustrating if there are multiple users using Discourse simultaneously while
sharing the same IP address (e.g. employees in an office).
This commit implements a new feature to make Discourse apply rate limits by
user id rather than IP address for users at or higher than the configured trust
level (1 is the default).
For example, let's say a Discourse instance is configured to allow 200 requests
per minute per IP address, and we have 10 users at trust level 4 using
Discourse simultaneously from the same IP address. Before this feature, the 10
users could only make a total of 200 requests per minute before they got rate
limited. But with the new feature, each user is allowed to make 200 requests
per minute because the rate limits are applied on user id rather than the IP
address.
The minimum trust level for applying user-id-based rate limits can be
configured by the `skip_per_ip_rate_limit_trust_level` global setting. The
default is 1, but it can be changed by either adding the
`DISCOURSE_SKIP_PER_IP_RATE_LIMIT_TRUST_LEVEL` environment variable with the
desired value to your `app.yml`, or changing the setting's value in the
`discourse.conf` file.
Requests made with API keys are still rate limited by IP address and the
relevant global settings that control API keys rate limits.
Before this commit, Discourse's auth cookie (`_t`) was simply a 32 characters
string that Discourse used to lookup the current user from the database and the
cookie contained no additional information about the user. However, we had to
change the cookie content in this commit so we could identify the user from the
cookie without making a database query before the rate limits logic and avoid
introducing a bottleneck on busy sites.
Besides the 32 characters auth token, the cookie now includes the user id,
trust level and the cookie's generation date, and we encrypt/sign the cookie to
prevent tampering.
Internal ticket number: t54739.
* FEATURE: Cache CORS preflight requests for 2h
Browsers will cache this for 5 seconds by default. If using MessageBus
in a different domain, Discourse will issue a new long polling, by
default, every 30s or so. This means we would be issuing a new preflight
request **every time**. This can be incredibly wasteful, so let's cache
the authorization in the client for 2h, which is the maximum Chromium
allows us as of today.
* fix tests
Previously we would consider a user "present" and "last seen" if the
browser window was visible.
This has many edge cases, you could be considered present and around for
days just by having a window open and no screensaver on.
Instead we now also check that you either clicked, transitioned around app
or scrolled the page in the last minute in combination with window
visibility
This will lead to more reliable notifications via email and reduce load of
message bus for cases where a user walks away from the terminal
This change both speeds up specs (less strings to allocate) and helps catch
cases where methods in Discourse are mutating inputs.
Overall we will be migrating everything to use #frozen_string_literal: true
it will take a while, but this is the first and safest move in this direction
Osama Sayegh
Rafael dos Santos Silva
Vinoth Kannan
Sam Saffron
Robin Ward
Davide Porrovecchio
Guo Xiang Tan