Rate limiting

You can find the rate limiters under the quota section of the config.

Rate limiting is an important mechanism for controlling resource utilization and managing quality of service.

There are two rate limiters:

• Connection limiter
  • triggered upfront on any new connection
• Login limiter
  • triggered just before authenticating player with Mojang to prevent flooding the Mojang API

Each rate limiter is IP block based but cutting off the last numbers (/24 block) as in 255.255.255.xxx.

Too many connections from the same IP-block (as configured) will be simply disconnected, and the default settings should never affect legitimate players and only rate limit aggressive behaviours.

TIP

The limiter only prevents attacks on a per IP block bases and cannot mitigate against distributed denial of services (DDoS), since this type of attack should be handled on a higher networking layer than Gate operates in.

See DDoS Protecting your Minecraft server for details.