Refererblock Version 0.2

I came up with two improvements to the first release of my refererblock plugin:

• If the referer string matches the site's URL it passed immediately and isn't checked against the blacklist.
• The blacklist.txt file was being read even if the referer string was empty. Now it is only read if the referer string is not empty and it isn't for the site's URL.

These optimizations do improve the performance of the plugin. My testing on a PIII 800MHz running Fedora Core 3 Linux with Apache 2.0 showed the following average latencies:

• 1.5 ms - Empty referer string or current domain.
• 2.0 ms - Referer string matching the first regex of the example blacklist file.
• 3.0 ms - Referer string matching the final regex of the example blacklist file.

I was kind of surprised at how little additional time was required to load the blacklist file and process the regular expressions. This is probably due to the file remaining in the disk cache for subsequent requests. Of course your mileage may vary.

Download version 0.2 of the plugin here.

See my original plugin description for installation, configuration, and testing information. Please let me know if you use this plugin or if you have comments or suggestions for improving it.

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