Thousands of Page Requests by website IP

Question

I was wondering if there was any logical explanation as to why the IP address of my Azure website makes tens of thousands of page requests to itself..?

It seemed to start after the awverify.www.yourdomain.com CNAME was setup in my domain name record.

Maybe it's a "heartbeat" test to the domain or something, in which case I'd rather setup something to that myself.

At the moment my biggest single user on my Azure website is its own IP address!

---

Simon - Emsg

Answer 1

Hi Simon,

If I understand you correctly ,  you are talking about the client requests that  your website gets from its own IP address .

How did you find that out ?  Have you created HTTP request using WebRequest to find out the outgoing requests from your website ?

I am currently researching to gather more information with regards to your request. I shall revert back to you with an update .

Please provide us the website url and relevant screen shot of the issue you are talking about.

Regards,

Shirisha Paderu 

Answer 2

Dear Shirisha Paderu

That's correct. It has been happening months now, as the picture from my application shows.  I can track it back to when I setup the awverify.www.yourdomain.com entry for my www.emsg.co.nz a couple of months ago. I only switched emsg to an Azure website yesterday, so essentially the 23.101.208.52 (Sydney datacenter) has been banging away at my old server all this time. Now it continues to hit the Azure website.

I know this is happening because my application records in a database the IP address of every client request to my site and tracks the number of requests. The application on the site does not make any calls to itself while a transaction record occurs whenever the application or default page is called (requests for images, for example, don't register in the database).

So, it must be something to do with the Azure verification of the domain name register.

I would like it to stop. Thanks.

I trust it isn't anything to do with the "Always ON" facility

---

Simon - Emsg

Answer 3

Hi,

Thanks for the response.

I am currently researching to gather more information with regards to your request and I shall revert back to you with an update at the earliest.

Sincerely appreciate your patience.

Regards,
Shirisha Paderu

Answer 4

Hi,

We do see a pattern of requests to the site, but our data doesn’t include the client IP. Some of the information in the logs is obfuscated from us and so request you to Please enable the HTTP logging and send HTTP logs along with Subscription ID , Datacenter region , time when the issue has started ( time zone ) to my E-mail v-shpade at Microsoft dot com.

Regards,

Shirisha Paderu

Answer 5

I've enabled logging on the site as requested, not much in it as yet.

However, I've sent a log from our local server for our site to moving the application live to Azure on the weekend. It clearly shows that the IP address 23.101.208.52 has been constantly and endlessly calling the default page, and in fact this has been going on for months now. 

Note that this was happening long before I even updated my domain name DNS to point to the new Azure site on the weekend, although I setup the awverify CNAME records some time ago, while the call to the default page continues now that we are on Azure.

This is burning up resources for no reason and it should stop. What is the purpose anyway...?

---

Simon - Emsg 

Answer 6

Dear Shirisha

As requested, I've sent the Azure web site log for my powerpage.co.nz website. You can see that the default page of the site is being called constantly by the IP address of the website 23.101.208.52 and another internal IP address 100.78.94.43 which seems to be associated with "always on". The same thing is happening to my emsg.co.nz and msgwrx.com sites which use the same database.

Below is just a sample of what is repeated thousands of time in the log file;

2014-12-02 06:52:49 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=1f85b92e-a0da-459f-9ebd-048a129a7df7 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 0 8172 569 503
2014-12-02 06:55:00 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.82.3 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2274 400 0
2014-12-02 06:55:02 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=6a7a01f4-d7c5-4cbb-8cf7-022c1fb3bf27 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 0 8172 569 484
2014-12-02 06:57:49 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.94.43 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2273 400 15
2014-12-02 06:57:49 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=9c149018-6dbf-435f-9340-2a5f90a979fc 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 0 8172 569 468
2014-12-02 07:00:01 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.82.3 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2274 400 0
2014-12-02 07:00:01 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=508e03e8-21b4-4f62-b1a5-25eb50bedd41 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 0 8172 569 555
2014-12-02 07:02:50 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.94.43 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2275 400 0
2014-12-02 07:02:50 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=bef73e44-98d5-4b8f-bffc-a52eb5067234 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 64 0 569 531
2014-12-02 07:05:01 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.82.3 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2274 400 16
2014-12-02 07:05:02 POWERPAGE GET / X-ARR-LOG-ID=48580877-0434-4dec-aa80-c1a4828da3aa 80 - 23.101.208.52 AlwaysOn ARRAffinity=b2767be311767fddc9f91e12277b9f196282d55562321c3611ca0720a26ff810 - www.powerpage.co.nz 200 0 0 8172 569 593
2014-12-02 07:07:50 ~1POWERPAGE GET / - 80 - 100.78.94.43 AlwaysOn - - ~1powerpage 200 0 0 2274 400 15

Appreciate you looking into this to find out what on earth is going on...

Thanks, Simon

---

Simon - Emsg

Answer 7

Hi,

Thanks for the logs.

Working on it.

Regards,

Shirisha Paderu

Answer 8

Hi,
 
If we look at the UserAgent column, we can see that all of these are for AlwaysOn and this is quite normal.

If you want it to stop, then you would have to disable AlwaysOn, but it’s likely that the end result of that is more detrimental than the requests it produces.

Regards,

Shirisha Paderu

Answer 9

Are you saying that the only way Microsoft can keep an Azure web site up and running continuously with "always on" is by hitting it endlessly with pointless requests...?

---

Simon - Emsg

Answer 10

Hi,

Not really..! 

But it is an enhancement for azure website. When the  “Always On” feature is is enabled on a site, “Windows Azure will automatically ping your website regularly to ensure that the website is always active and in a warm/running state,” “This is useful to ensure that a site is always responsive (and that the app domain or worker process has not paged out due to lack of external HTTP requests).”

For example if in case Azure unloads your site if it is idle for the standard 20 minute timeout, which can cause slow responses for the initial site users after it is unloaded.  Enabling Always On essentially causes Azure to automatically ping your site periodically to ensure that it remains in a running state.  There are no extra charges for enabling Always On, but you should already be knowing that this not an available option for lower end plans.

To learn more about these changes and others, head over to Guthrie’s ScottGu Blog, where he explains these new features and others in detail.

Regards,

Shirisha Paderu