Bad RSS URL causes loops and 503 errors

  • mmihelic

    (@mmihelic)


    5 months ago

    Users managed to create the following situation on our multisite install. Three sites were created and each site embedded an RSS feed from the other two sites. They used the RSS feed block in the widgets section. The RSS feeds were in the format of https://site-1.example.com instead of https://site-1.example.com/feed.
    This way each site called upon two sites that called upon two sites that called upon two sites that called upon two sites… The web servers filled up all workers and the whole service became unavailable.
    The WordPress native RSS parser does not seem to have any protection against such situations.

    Is there any way to protect against such loops?

    • This topic was modified 5 months ago by mmihelic.
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  • Do you have any server logs to share that specifically point to this loop?

    From my (admittedly limited) understanding, simply embedding the feed should not cause any such loop.

    This should only become a problem if you’re actually re-publishing the fetched posts as new posts on the destination site (but the native RSS block doesn’t support this).

    I’m curious to see what you have in your logs to come to this conclusion.

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