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I am suddenly getting flooded with requests from Google's image proxy servers that look like the following:

66.249.81.250 - - [04/May/2015:06:55:54 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.93.170 - - [04/May/2015:06:56:31 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.93.170 - - [04/May/2015:06:56:31 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.83.202 - - [04/May/2015:06:56:44 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
64.233.173.224 - - [04/May/2015:06:56:45 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.81.244 - - [04/May/2015:06:56:49 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.83.196 - - [04/May/2015:06:57:19 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
64.233.173.218 - - [04/May/2015:06:57:27 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.83.208 - - [04/May/2015:06:57:30 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.88.250 - - [04/May/2015:06:57:32 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"
66.249.88.252 - - [04/May/2015:06:57:32 +0000] "GET /images/image_1.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 93394 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:11.0) Gecko Firefox/11.0 (via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"

As you can see, my server (Apache 2.2.22) is responding with the full 200 and resending the image for every request. When I make the same request in a browser, I get a 304 response and the following headers:

Cache-Control:max-age=5184000
Date:Mon, 04 May 2015 06:43:00 GMT
Expires:Fri, 03 Jul 2015 06:43:00 GMT

Is there some reason that the Google image proxy is not honoring these and is there anything I can do about it beyond turning on something like Cloudflare and hoping for the best? I understand from...

Apache logs flooded with connections - "(via ggpht.com GoogleImageProxy)"

... that this is "normal" traffic but I'm not happy about having to re-serve the entire 100kb file every time.

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  • I've tried adding the "public" flag to the Cache-Control header and it may have slowed the requests down, but I'm not sure if it's coincidental. I'll update this after looking at my traffic over the next few hours. May 4, 2015 at 8:10

1 Answer 1

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The Goolge image proxy is caching.
You can easily test this by embedding an image into an e-mail and send it to an Gmail account you have control over.
Reload the page a few times (with dropped cache of course).
The cache gets hit, your server will not receive any request.

It's unclear if the same cached URL/file gets served to multiple users.
Maybe this is what you are seeing.

But anyway: If you send an e-mail to 10 people and embedded an image into it, you should expect your server having to serve 10 requests.
I don't see how this is flooding.

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  • I tested and agree - it's just really strange to suddenly see literally hundreds of these on a very obscure site, but you're right nonetheless. May 4, 2015 at 15:35

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