The spatial streams are connections made between the router and the client device where data is being sent. To get an even better grasp of what I am talking about, we need to go way back, down to the WiFi 3 (IEEE 802.11g standard) and lower which used what is called SISO systems (Single Input Single Output). The idea was to use a single transmitter antenna and the signal would get received by the access point on a single antenna.
And it’s true that the early days of WiFi routers were promising, but also quite rough because without clear line of sight, the AP could experience reflections of the signal in the room (multi-path fading), the risk to experience the cliff effect if there are too many interference and more. Obviously, these problems were mostly fixed with the emergence of the MIMO, which uses multiple transmission antennas to send the signal towards multiple reception antennas.
SISO (Single Input Single Output)
In other words, the slightly more modern approach is to use multiple spatial streams to send and receive the data. Then there’s the MU-MIMO which takes things to another level. And I know you came here to understand what the numbers on the router box actually mean, if MU-MIMO actually matters and if support for 4×4, 8×8 or 16×16 (and more) are something that your wireless router (or separate access point) needs to have. You will see that most of is just over-the-top advertising with little to no real-life improvements to the WiFi performance, so let’s see why that is. Before that, let’s get a better understanding of the spatial streams and MIMO.
We already established what the SISO is, but there are some other configurations that the manufacturers have explored before using the MIMO approach. For example, the SIMO (Single Input Multiple Output) uses more than one receiver antennas on the same radio to capture the signal, so it has more than one chances to be properly processed. And there’s also the MISO approach where the signal is broadcasted across more than one stream with a single antenna receiving it.
The MIMO is the better form, where the same signal is transmitted across multiple streams and it is also received by multiple antennas. But, it’s not that it chooses which signal is the better one, no, all get processed and the end result is what the receiver interprets to be the original signal based on what it received at different intervals, with various amounts of data loss and so on. What we previously discussed is called spatial diversity where the same signal gets transmitted across multiple spatial streams towards multiple antennas, therefore keeping the risk of degradation to the minimum, but there are other approaches as well.
MIMO – Spatial Diversity and Spatial Multiplexing.
One of them is called spatial multiplexing where the idea is to increase the data transfer rate since more than one independent stream of data is transmitted via multiple streams. The risk comes from interference which is why the data streams aren’t transmitted at the same time, but are phased out at different points in time. Another method that helps move data without risking collision or interference is by dividing the bandwidth into multiple frequency bands, each used to stream an independent and separate signal.
It’s also know as FDM, but I am sure you may have also heard about the OFDM which moved data a bit different. To make the bandwidth use even more efficient, the carriers are orthogonal. This means that instead of being far apart, as they were with the FDM, with the OFDM, they are more densely packed and the distance between carriers is minimal since there is little adjacent channel interference.
Spatial Streams and MU-MIMO
MU-MIMO (Multiple User Multiple Input Multiple Output) is supposed to be some sort of holy grail for handling multiple demanding client devices. That’s because while SU-MIMO (or MIMO) can handle one client device at a time, the MU-MIMO should serve more than one devices at the same time.
MU-MIMO – Linksys EA8500.
If you don’t yet know, the way the client devices are handled ‘in the traditional sense’ (SU-MIMO), is first arrived, first served. So, if the device is connected at a high data transfer rate, it receives or sends the data quickly and lets another device to be served. With the modern hardware, you won’t even notice that your WiFi devices actually take turns. That it, unless you start streaming large packets of data at the same time on multiple devices which is where you’re going to start seeing the buffering icon.
Furthermore, be aware that devices that are far away and are connected at a lower data transfer rate are going to slow down the network because it will take longer to finish up the task (which is why it’s better to avoid legacy devices and to not increase the transmit power on your access point).
MU-MIMO doesn’t really change the way it handles a single client, but it can do the same for more than one devices at the same time. Imagine that your router starts behaving as if it were two, four or more routers at the same time. This way, the client devices don’t have to wait one after the other. The problem is that MU-MIMO doesn’t seem to rise to the expectations. Yet.
Is MU-MIMO under performing?
On paper, it shouldn’t. And the router boxes do have the theoretical maximum data transfer rates printed in bold letters and numbers. So, the first culprit is the advertisement. You know that Asus, TP-Link, Linksys or Netgear router that seemingly should reach 6,000Mbps (AX6000) or more since we also have AX1100 routers now? Well, you’re not going to see those number in real life.
Netgear RAX43.
Actually if you’re checking the single stream performance, it most likely won’t even get close to 1Gbps. So, what’s the deal? Well, the manufacturers add up the maximum possible rate for each radio, which, in turn is based on the maximum amount of data streams that can be handled at the same time. This means that using MU-MIMO, you’re going to actually see a better performance? Well, not as much as you’d have hoped and in some cases, you may actually see a worse performance.
At least two sources (1)(2) have confirmed that not only did they not see a better performance when using MU-MIMO devices, but in some cases it was actually a bit worse. That’s not because the technology is bad, it’s because the WiFi adapters just aren’t that great. Most PC adapters, laptops and smartphones are still stuck with a 2×2 MU-MIMO WiFi adapter. And both Qualcomm and Broadcom chipsets seem to drop to 1×1 even if the client devices were 2×2, while the router was 4×4. These tests were done with WiFi 5 hardware, where MU-MIMO was limited to downstream only. So has anything changed with WiFi 6?
Besides adding support for MU-MIMO upstream as well, it does seem that MU-MIMO does offer some improvements with WiFi 6 client devices and access points, but only detrimental. So, it seems that MU-MIMO can be useful in only very specific scenarios, in a very crowded network, where the client devices don’t move around.
WiFi 6 adapter on a Desktop PC.
But, in most cases, it’s still a borderline gimmick that manufacturers like to put on their box to sell the router. That’s because the client devices are still way behind the WiFi technological advances and the consumer routers are underpowered. Still, if you have multiple 4×4 MU-MIMO PCs and a powerful WiFi 6 access points, you may see a benefit if your network is pushed to the limit.
Beamforming
You may have seen the term Beamforming being advertised alongside MU-MIMO on the wireless router / AP boxes and it refers to a very interesting technique where the signal is transmitted towards the connected clients and not broadcasted everywhere. The way the wireless routers (or access points) do this is by identifying the compatible receiver and then increasing the power output (including the transfer data rates) only towards that client device. The particularity of using Beamforming is that it’s effective only for medium-range transmissions.
If the client device is close enough to the router, then it’s already at a high transfer rate and it doesn’t need to use Beamforming. The same is true if the client device is too far because the gain from Beamforming will not be enough to increase the data transfer rate. But what’s even more interesting is that despite being advertised as a technology that’s going to change the way your devices connect to the network, it’s actually very rarely used with commercial devices. That’s because of the aforementioned antenna gain.
Source: TP-Link official website.
Beamforming works best with Point to Point access points because the idea is to focus the signal over very large distances with clear line of sight, without worrying about going above some set limit. Indoors, there is a limit set by EIRP and your access point or wireless router will make sure it won’t go above it. So, even if the Beamforming is able to push way past that limit (for example, three or four beamforming antennas can easily go past the 6dbi maximum gain), the transmit power will be severely cut.
But there is more because it seems that the WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 routers (and access points) will prioritize spatial multiplexing over beamforming, especially on the 4×4 and lower devices. Obviously, the one at a time approach still applies here as well, and the AP will switch dynamically between the supported modes when handling a client device. Even so, having the support for more multiple spatial streams, the better for the signal, right? Yes, the more spatial streams that are available, the more ways to properly transmit the data you will have, ensuring that it arrives at the destination quickly and as intact as possible.
Download the popular SSH tool PuTTy from the Internet.
Log in Yeastar S-Series IPPBX web interface, navigate to Settings > System > Security > Service, Enable SSH. And note that since version 30.7.0.27, the SSH password had been changed to random password which you could see when you enable the SSH service.
Open the PuTTy, and enter the login IP, Port and Connection type(SSH).
Host Name: IP address of the Yeastar S-Series IPPBX
Port: default SSH port is 8022
Set the scrollback line number so that you can get sufficient lines of log for debug analysis.
Click the Apply to enter SSH interface. Log in SSH with the following credential:
Username: support
Password: iyeastar (or random password)
Note: when you enter the password, it’s in invisible form that you can’t see what you are inputting.
Command Mode and Asterisk Mode
Next we introduce you the important 2 modes in SSH interface: Command mode and Asterisk mode. After you enter the SSH interface, it is the Command mode. In this mode, you can execute the Linux based commands, like ls, cd, route and so on.
To enter Asterisk mode, you can input asterisk -vvvvvvvvvr in Command mode. In this mode, you are able to execute the Asterisk based commands, like pjsip show endpoints, pjsip set logger on and so on.
Please noted if you change any of the port on the PBX should also change the port number on the router.
3. SIP ALG feature enabled on the router
The SIP ALG feature will manipulate the value in the sip SDP message and cause the Linkus client to send RTP to incorrect IP address or port.
4. Incorrect NAT settings on the PBX
When you login Linkus remotely like with cellular network, the NAT settings is used to tell Linkus client where to send the voice stream.
Local Network Identification is used to let PBX know the local IP segment like the IP segment for PBX or IP phones.
For example, the local IP address of the PBX or IP Phones is 192.168.9.x so you put 192.168.9.1/255.255.255.0 in the setting.
Also, need to check this configuration when you have 30s call disconnected issue with Linkus.
If you use domain or DDNS you can select the NAT Type to external host
5. Codec translation issue
Refer to this to guide enter Asterisk CLI: Asterisk CLI
Enter the command in Asterisk CLI ‘ core show translation paths ilbc ‘.
If it shows No Translation Path to G729 or ulaw, ulaw codec please submit a ticket on Yeastar Support Portal
6. RTP has been blocked by the router or the provider
You could try our LCS service.
Enable Linkus Cloud Service(LCS) on the Linkus Server. LCS use the tunnel to transmit data it does not needs to set port forwarding on the router and more secure.
For now, Linkus still have no voice issue with the Etisalat Carrier in Dubai.
Updated: Jan 22, 2024, 15:17 PM By Claire Broadley Content Manager REVIEWED By Jared Atchison President and co-owner
Is Gmail blocking emails that you send? You’re not alone.
Google has always been strict in blocking rogue senders in its fight against spam.
In 2024, it’s tightening up the rules and enforcing tighter anti-spam limits. That means emails you send to Gmail mailboxes won’t arrive if you’re not compliant.
The amount of spam emails that Google’s servers deal with is mind-bogglingly huge. About half of all emails sent daily are spam, and according to The Tech Report, about 1.8 billion people use Gmail. It has a vested interest in keeping spam out of its customers’ inboxes.
This article explains who’s impacted by Google’s new sending requirements, what exactly will change this year, and what you need to do to ensure your emails are delivered.
Gmail is likely blocking your emails for one of 2 reasons. Either you’re on a spam blacklist already, or you don’t comply with its new requirements for bulk senders.
Reason 1. Google Put Your Domain On a Spam Blacklist
It only takes a few people to click Mark as Spam in Gmail for your domain reputation to be impacted. This can result in Gmail adding your email to a blacklist if the spam complaints build up.
Once you’re on a blacklist, you’ll have to earn the trust of email providers to be removed.
“Getting off a blacklist is often not a straightforward task. It’s usually not just a case of requesting your removal – you’ll also have to show what you’ve done to resolve the issues that lead to your blacklisting in the first place. ”
-Rachel Adnyana, Email Deliverability Expert at SendLayer
Blacklists are not new, but the threshold for being added to one is lower than it once was.
The telltale sign that you’re on a blacklist is an error like this:
421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily rate limited.
550-5.7.1 Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked.
You may see a different 500 error when sending an email if you’re impacted by this. You can look through the SendLayer error library if you see an error you don’t understand.
We’ll explain how you can resolve this problem in just a minute. First, let’s look at the other possible cause of emails to Gmail being blocked.
Reason 2. Your Emails Aren’t Authenticated
Emails are often sent without authentication, but they are sometimes delivered anyway.
If you have a WordPress website, it’ll send emails without authentication by default. You will likely find them in your spam folder.
Some Gmail users will find their contact form emails don’t arrive at all.
As email providers become less tolerant of unauthenticated emails, we’re seeing more support tickets from customers whose WordPress emails go to spam. Some say they used to be delivered, but now aren’t. It’s confusing when this happens. “I didn’t change anything, so why did my emails stop sending?”
It’s not that your website changed. It’s more likely that the rules for detecting spam got tougher. Soon, senders who don’t authenticate their emails will be blocked from emailing Gmail recipients at all.
The telltale sign is an error like this:
550-5.7.26 This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. For this message, DKIM checks did not pass and SPF check for example.com did not pass with ip: 192.186.0.1.
As you can see, Google is cracking down on domains that don’t have SPF, DMARC, and DKIM configured. If you’re not sure what that means, I’ll explain more in the next section.
Who Do Gmail’s New Rules Apply To?
Initially, the SPF, DMARC, and DKIM requirement will apply to bulk senders. Google defines a bulk sender as a domain that has, at some point, sent more than 5,000 emails to Gmail recipients in a single day.
‘Gmail recipients’ means anyone with an email ending @gmail.com or @googlemail.com, and people who are using custom domains or Google Workspace to receive emails.
You only need to send 5,000 emails once to be considered a bulk sender forever. Remember: this applies to all emails you send from your domain.
Email authentication is best practise and should be set up to maintain good deliverability — even if you’re not considered a bulk sender.
How to Stop Gmail Blocking Your Emails
Now to the important part. How do you stop Gmail blocking the emails you send?
Email deliverability issues can seriously harm your business. If you use Google Workspace, they could even prevent you from sending emails to your own employees.
If your newsletters are considered to be spam, and people mark them as such, that could mean your purchase receipts don’t get through in the future.
No matter why Gmail is blocking your emails, the solutions are the same. First, let’s set up a free reporting tool so you can see your email spam complaints.
1. Set Up Google Postmaster Tools (Bulk Senders)
Google Postmaster Tools is a free tool that will show you exactly what your spam complaint rate is.
If you send a large number of emails, it’s worth creating an account because it will allow you to understand your current standing with Gmail.
You’ll need to authenticate your domain before your spam complaint rate appears. If you’ve already authenticated it for services like Google Analytics, you may find that setup is almost instant.
If you see any spikes in Postmaster Tools’ spam reporting, or you’re consistently maintaining a level of spam complaints over 0.1%, you might not be able to send emails to Gmail recipients (and that includes customers on Google Workspace).
The absolute maximum spam complaint rate that Google will tolerate is 0.3%.
If your spam complaints are trending higher, it’s a sign you need to get to the bottom of the causes. People could be marking emails as spam for all kinds of reasons, but here are a few that Google has specifically highlighted:
You might be sending emails to people who are not expecting to receive them.
Trying to get people on a mailing list to inflate the size can be tempting. After all, you’ll cast a wider net when you send out a marketing email.
But it will could your deliverability too. More people will mark your emails as spam if you don’t give them any choice.
You might not be making it easy for people to unsubscribe.
You need to have a way for people to unsubscribe from your emails. You also need to implement a one-click unsubscribe list header if your email marketing platform supports that.
People could be sending spam through your website forms.
This is surprisingly common. If you don’t protect your contact form from spam, the junk email that passes through it hurts your deliverability because it appears to come from your domain.
You have a security issue on your website and you’re spamming people without even knowing.
In WordPress, there are a few common causes of poor security:
Poor security on your WordPress admin account, meaning your passwords are easy to guess and other people can get into your dashboard.
Nulled plugins, which can contain malicious code, including code that sends spam or phishing emails.
Poor security on your hosting account; for example, if you have a VPS, you need to watch out for hackers getting access and setting up SMTP relays that blast out emails without you knowing.
All in all, this is about keeping a close eye on what you’re sending and who you’re sending to.
2. Authenticate Emails From WordPress
If you’re still using WordPress without an SMTP plugin, we highly recommend that you install one to stop messages to Gmail from being blocked.
WP Mail SMTP steps in to handle all outgoing email from your WordPress site, routing it through a proper email provider. That authenticates the emails and stops them from being blocked.
WP Mail SMTP easy to set up thanks to the Setup Wizard and it supports many popular email platforms.
You can also purchase the additional plugin setup service if you need a hand getting your email authentication working.
The Pro version of WP Mail SMTP is worth it because it adds lots of useful email logging and routing features. But if you just need to fix blocked emails to Gmail, the free version of WP Mail SMTP will do that.
We already talked about issues that can arise without proper authentication.
You can authenticate your emails by ensuring they have the correct email headers: DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.
These 3 records prove that the emails you send are from you — the domain owner — not a random person pretending to be you.
In the past, you could get away without setting up these records, but Google will no longer allow you to skip this. If you’re seeing the 5.7.26 error from Gmail, you need to review your DNS records to figure out what’s missing.
Your email provider(s) will typically provide all 3 records and explain how to add them to your DNS. If you need a little more help, we have a few blog posts to help you understand what’s required:
Just to add: Google also requires a PTR record, which is sometimes called forward reverse DNS, or full circle DNS.
Your web host or email provider should handle the creation and management of your PTR record, but it’s worth checking that it has been set up, just to rule out any future problems. See our post on What is a PTR record? to find out more.
The From Email is the sender email — the email address your emails appear to come from.
You should send emails from an email address at the same domain as your website. In other words, don’t authenticate your domain and send emails from a totally different account elsewhere. Make sure everything matches.
WP Mail SMTP has settings specifically to allow you to set the from email (and the corresponding from name):
What about real email addresses vs fake ones? It’s good practise to avoid using noreply@domain.com (or any non-existent email address) as a From Email.
5. Send Email With TLS
When you’re sending emails through WordPress (or any other platform) using an SMTP server, you should use a provider that uses TLS to make the connection.
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. It’s better than SSL because it’s more secure, and the end goal is that TLS will eventually replace the older SSL protocol.
We don’t need to go into a huge amount of detail on this. Most email providers will support TLS so you may already be using it. But it’s worth double-checking your account to make sure you’re using the latest settings.
6. Add Unsubscribe Links to Marketing Emails
Most businesses send transactional emails and marketing emails.
So what’s the difference?
Transactional emails are emails that are necessary for the normal operation of your business. Password reset emails, renewal reminders, and receipts are all transactional. These kinds of emails usually need to be delivered immediately to be effective.
Marketing emails are emails you send to promote your products and services. They don’t necessarily need to be sent immediately, and they are not essential for a customer.
There are 2 things to think about here.
First, marketing emails must have an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email. The link doesn’t have to be huge, but it has to be clearly visible.
Second, you should also make sure that your newsletters have a one-click unsubscribe link at the top.
In Gmail, this link triggers an instant unsubscribe popup. This is going to be important if you want to prevent your emails from being blocked in the future.
The one-click unsubscribe link near the subject line is triggered by list unsubscribe headers. Your email provider should be able to add these headers for you.
If you’re not sure what to ask for, the header is the technical part of the email that we don’t normally see; here’s what it looks like:
One question we’re asked a lot is this: Do transactional emails need to have unsubscribe links? They do not. However:
Include unsubscribe links in all marketing emails.
Don’t send emails that have a mixture of transactional and marketing content in them to try to get around this rule.
It’s OK to give people the choice of which email marketing lists they want to be subscribed to, but Google is clear that you must also provide an option to unsubscribe from all marketing emails.
7. Use Double Optins Where Possible
Google recommends that everyone who sends marketing emails uses double optins.
A double optin means that someone has to choose to join your list and confirm their choice, usually by clicking a confirmation link.
While Google won’t block emails to Gmail if you don’t use double optins, the truth is that single optins result in higher spam complaints. So implementing them will keep that important spam complaint rate low.
The downside of double optins is that you’ll grow your list more slowly because you will sign up fewer leads.
Recovering From a Gmail Block
If your WordPress emails are being blocked to Gmail recipients, running through this guide should help you to figure out the reason why.
If Google is rejecting emails from your domain because it’s missing some crucial DNS records, adding them might resolve the problem quickly.
If your domain or IP is on a blacklist, it’ll take longer to recover. You’ll need to earn the trust of email providers and slowly improve your domain or IP reputation.
Make it easy for people to leave your mailing lists and don’t send them emails they don’t want. This will reduce the likelihood of them marking emails as spam, therefore keeping your spam complaint rate low.
It can take time to clean up your lists, but removing people who aren’t opening your emails is a good first step. Re-engagement workflows typically unsubscribe people who aren’t responsive, helping to reduce spam complaints, and automatically unsubscribing invalid email addresses can also help.
Email providers like Brevo or SMTP.com are used to helping customers with these issues. If you’re concerned, reach out to them for advice. They may be able to change your sender IP or help you look into your bounce rates to diagnose the problem.
It’s difficult to say how long recovery will take. It depends on the reason you were blocked and the severity of the problem. Either way, prevention is always better than the cure.
If WordPress emails are not being delivered to Gmail and you can’t figure out why, our support team is standing by to help.
Ready to fix your emails? Get started today with the best WordPress SMTP plugin. If you don’t have the time to fix your emails, you can get full White Glove Setup assistance as an extra purchase, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee for all paid plans.
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Ajax is a JavaScript-based web technology that helps you to build dynamic and interactive websites. WordPress uses Ajax to power many of its core admin area features such as auto-saving posts, user session management, and notifications.
By default, WordPress directs all Ajax calls through the admin-ajax.php file located in the site’s /wp-admin directory.
Numerous simultaneous Ajax requests can lead to high admin-ajax.php usage, resulting in a considerably slowed down server and website. It’s one of the most common problems faced by many unoptimized WordPress sites. Typically, it manifests itself as a slow website or an HTTP 5xx error (mostly 504 or 502 errors).
In this article, you’ll learn about WordPress’ admin-ajax.php file, how it works, its benefits and drawbacks, and how you can diagnose and fix the high admin-ajax.php usage issue.
Ready to go? Let’s roll out!
What Is the admin-ajax.php File?
The admin-ajax.php file contains all the code for routing Ajax requests on WordPress. Its primary purpose is to establish a connection between the client and the server using Ajax. WordPress uses it to refresh the page’s contents without reloading it, thus making it dynamic and interactive to the users.
A basic overview of how Admin Ajax works on WordPress
Since the WordPress core already uses Ajax to power its various backend features, you can use the same functions to use Ajax on WordPress. All you need to do is register an action, point it to your site’s admin-ajax.php file, and define how you want it to return the value. You can set it to return HTML, JSON, or even XML.
admin-ajax.php file in WordPress
As per WordPress Trac, the admin-ajax.php file first appeared in WordPress 2.1. It’s also referred to as Ajax Admin in the WordPress development community.
Checking Ajax usage in MyKinsta dashboard
The chart above only shows the amount of admin-ajax.php requests, not where they might be coming from. It’s a great way to see when the spikes are occurring. You can combine it with other techniques mentioned in this post to narrow down the primary cause.
Checking the number of admin-ajax.php requests in Chrome DevTools
You can also use Chrome DevTools to see how many requests are being sent to admin-ajax.php. You can also check out the Timings tab under the Network section to find out how much time it takes to process these requests.
As for finding the exact reason behind high admin-ajax.php usage, there are primarily two main causes: one due to frontend, and the other due to backend. We’ll discuss both below.
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How to Debug High admin-ajax.php Usage on WordPress
Third-party plugins are one of the most common reasons behind high admin-ajax.php usage. Typically, this issue is seen on the site’s frontend and shows up frequently in speed test reports.
But plugins aren’t the only culprit here as themes, the WordPress core, the webserver, and a DDoS attack can also be the reason behind high Admin Ajax usage.
Let’s explore them in more detail.
How to Determine the Origin of High admin-ajax.php Usage for Plugins and Themes
Just because a plugin uses Ajax doesn’t mean that it’ll slow down your site.
Viewing the admin-ajax.php request in WebPageTest report
Usually, Admin Ajax loads towards the end of the page load. Also, you can set Ajax requests to load asynchronously, so it can have little to no effect on the page’s perceived performance for the user.
As you can see in the WebPageTest report above, admin-ajax.php loads towards the end of the requests queue, but it still takes up 780 ms. That’s a lot of time for just one request.
GTmetrix report indicating a serious admin-ajax.php usage spike
When developers don’t implement Ajax properly on WordPress, it can lead to drastic performance issues. The above GTmetrix report is a perfect example of such behavior.
You can also use GTmetrix to dig into individual post and response data. You can use this feature to pinpoint what’s causing the issue.
To do that, go to GTmetrix report’s Waterfall tab, and then find and click the POST admin-ajax.php item. You’ll see three tabs for this request: Headers, Post, and Response.
POST admin-ajax.php request’s Headers data
Checking out the request’s Post and Response tabs will give you some hints to find out the reasons behind the performance issue. For this site, you can see clues in the Response tab.
POST admin-ajax.php request’s Response data
You can see that part of the response has something to do with an input tag with id set to “fusion-form-nonce-656”.
A quick search of this clue will lead you to ThemeFusion’s website, the creators of Avada theme. Hence, you can conclude that the request is originating from the theme, or any of the plugins it’s bundled with.
In such a case, you must first ensure that the Avada theme and all its related plugins are fully updated. If that doesn’t fix the issue, then you can try disabling the theme and see if that fixes the issue.
Unlike disabling a plugin, disabling a theme isn’t feasible in most scenarios. Hence, try optimizing the theme to remove any bottlenecks. You can also reach out to the theme’s support team to see if they can suggest a better solution.
Testing another slow website in GTmetrix led to finding similar issues with Visual Composer page builder and Notification Bar plugins.
Another POST admin-ajax.php request’s Response dataPOST admin-ajax.php request’s Post data
Thankfully, if you cannot resolve an issue with the plugin, you most like have many alternative plugins available to try out. For example, when it comes to page builders you could also try out Beaver Builder or Elementor.
One platform, dozens of premium hosting features
The list is too long for this section. But you can find them all here. (Hint: you’ll save $275 worth of premium features, included in all WordPress plans.)
How to Determine the Origin of High admin-ajax.php
Sometimes, the Post and Response data presented in speed test reports may not be as clear and straightforward. Here, finding the origin of high admin-ajax.php usage isn’t as easy. In such cases, you can always do it the old-school way.
Disable all your site’s plugins, clear your site’s cache (if any), and then run a speed test again. If admin-ajax.php is still present, then the most likely culprit is the theme. But if it’s nowhere to be found, then you must activate each plugin one-by-one and run the speed tests each time. By process of elimination, you’ll lock down on the issue’s origin.
Diagnosing Backend Server Issues with admin-ajax.php
The second most common reason for high admin-ajax.php usage is the WordPress Heartbeat API generating frequent Ajax calls, leading to high CPU usage on the server. Typically, this is caused because of many users logged into the WordPress backend dashboard. Hence, you won’t see this show up in speed tests.
By default, the Heartbeat API polls the admin-ajax.php file every 15 seconds to auto-save posts or pages. If you’re using a shared hosting server, then you don’t have many server resources dedicated to your site. If you’re editing a post or page and leave the tab open for a significant time, then it can rack up a lot of Admin Ajax requests.
For example, when you’re writing or editing posts, a single user alone can generate 240 requests in an hour!
Frequent autosave admin-ajax.php requests
That’s a lot of requests on the backend with just one user. Now imagine a site where there are multiple editors logged in concurrently. Such a site can rack up Ajax requests rapidly, generating high CPU usage.
That was the situation discovered by DARTDrones when the company was preparing its WooCommerce site for an expected surge in traffic following an appearance on Shark Tank.
Before being featured on the television show, the DARTDrones site was receiving over 4,100 admin-ajax.php calls in a day with only 2,000 unique visitors. That’s a weak requests-to-visits ratio.
Heavy admin-ajax.php usage on dartdrones.com
Investigators noticed the /wp-admin referrer URL and correctly determined the root cause. These requests were due to DARTDrones’ admins and editors updating the site frequently in anticipation of the show.
WordPress has fixed this Heartbeat API issue partially long ago. For instance, you can reduce the frequency of requests generated by the Heartbeat API on hosts with limited resources. It also suspends itself after one hour of keyboard/mouse/touch inactivity.
Overwhelming your site with a DDoS attack or spam bots can also lead to high admin-ajax.php usage. However, such an attack doesn’t necessarily target increasing Admin Ajax requests. It’s just collateral damage.
If your site is under a DDoS attack, your priority should be to get it behind a robust CDN/WAF like Cloudflare or Sucuri. Every hosting plan with Kinsta includes free Cloudflare integration and Kinsta CDN, which can help you offload your website’s resources to a large extent.
WordPress uses Ajax in its Heartbeat API to implement many of its core features. However, it can lead to increased load times if not used correctly. This is typically caused due to a high frequency of requests to the admin-ajax.php file.
In this article, you learned the various causes for high admin-ajax.php usage, how to diagnose what’s responsible for this symptom, and how you can go about fixing it. In most cases, following this guide should get your site back up and running smoothly in no time.
However, in some cases upgrading to a server with higher resources is the only viable solution. Especially for demanding use cases such as ecommerce and membership sites. If you’re running such a site, consider upgrading to a managed WordPress host who is experienced with these types of performance issues.
If you’re still struggling with high admin-ajax.php usage on your WordPress site, let us know in the comments section.
Save time and costs, plus maximize site performance, with $275+ worth of enterprise-level integrations included in every Managed WordPress plan. This includes a high-performance CDN, DDoS protection, malware and hack mitigation, edge caching, and Google’s fastest CPU machines. Get started with no long-term contracts, assisted migrations, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Check out our plans or talk to sales to find the plan that’s right for you.
Salman Ravoof
Salman Ravoof is a self-taught web developer, writer, creator, and a huge admirer of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Besides tech, he’s excited by science, philosophy, photography, arts, cats, and food. Learn more about him on his website, and connect with Salman on Twitter.
Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Cloudflare’s DDoS Threat Report. This edition covers DDoS trends and key findings for the fourth and final quarter of the year 2023, complete with a review of major trends throughout the year.
What are DDoS attacks?
DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a type of cyber attack that aims to disrupt websites and online services for users, making them unavailable by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can handle. They are similar to car gridlocks that jam roads, preventing drivers from getting to their destination.
There are three main types of DDoS attacks that we will cover in this report. The first is an HTTP request intensive DDoS attack that aims to overwhelm HTTP servers with more requests than they can handle to cause a denial of service event. The second is an IP packet intensive DDoS attack that aims to overwhelm in-line appliances such as routers, firewalls, and servers with more packets than they can handle. The third is a bit-intensive attack that aims to saturate and clog the Internet link causing that ‘gridlock’ that we discussed. In this report, we will highlight various techniques and insights on all three types of attacks.
Previous editions of the report can be found here, and are also available on our interactive hub, Cloudflare Radar. Cloudflare Radar showcases global Internet traffic, attacks, and technology trends and insights, with drill-down and filtering capabilities for zooming in on insights of specific countries, industries, and service providers. Cloudflare Radar also offers a free API allowing academics, data sleuths, and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.
To learn how we prepare this report, refer to our Methodologies.
Key findings
In Q4, we observed a 117% year-over-year increase in network-layer DDoS attacks, and overall increased DDoS activity targeting retail, shipment and public relations websites during and around Black Friday and the holiday season.
In Q4, DDoS attack traffic targeting Taiwan registered a 3,370% growth, compared to the previous year, amidst the upcoming general election and reported tensions with China. The percentage of DDoS attack traffic targeting Israeli websites grew by 27% quarter-over-quarter, and the percentage of DDoS attack traffic targeting Palestinian websites grew by 1,126% quarter-over-quarter — as the military conflict between Israel and Hamas continues.
In Q4, there was a staggering 61,839% surge in DDoS attack traffic targeting Environmental Services websites compared to the previous year, coinciding with the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28).
For an in-depth analysis of these key findings and additional insights that could redefine your understanding of current cybersecurity challenges, read on!
Illustration of a DDoS attack
Hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks
2023 was the year of uncharted territories. DDoS attacks reached new heights — in size and sophistication. The wider Internet community, including Cloudflare, faced a persistent and deliberately engineered campaign of thousands of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks at never before seen rates.
These attacks were highly complex and exploited an HTTP/2 vulnerability. Cloudflare developed purpose-built technology to mitigate the vulnerability’s effect and worked with others in the industry to responsibly disclose it.
As part of this DDoS campaign, in Q3 our systems mitigated the largest attack we’ve ever seen — 201 million requests per second (rps). That’s almost 8 times larger than our previous 2022 record of 26 million rps.
Largest HTTP DDoS attacks as seen by Cloudflare, by year
Growth in network-layer DDoS attacks
After the hyper-volumetric campaign subsided, we saw an unexpected drop in HTTP DDoS attacks. Overall in 2023, our automated defenses mitigated over 5.2 million HTTP DDoS attacks consisting of over 26 trillion requests. That averages at 594 HTTP DDoS attacks and 3 billion mitigated requests every hour.
Despite these astronomical figures, the amount of HTTP DDoS attack requests actually declined by 20% compared to 2022. This decline was not just annual but was also observed in 2023 Q4 where the number of HTTP DDoS attack requests decreased by 7% YoY and 18% QoQ.
On the network-layer, we saw a completely different trend. Our automated defenses mitigated 8.7 million network-layer DDoS attacks in 2023. This represents an 85% increase compared to 2022.
In 2023 Q4, Cloudflare’s automated defenses mitigated over 80 petabytes of network-layer attacks. On average, our systems auto-mitigated 996 network-layer DDoS attacks and 27 terabytes every hour. The number of network-layer DDoS attacks in 2023 Q4 increased by 175% YoY and 25% QoQ.
HTTP and Network-layer DDoS attacks by quarter
DDoS attacks increase during and around COP 28
In the final quarter of 2023, the landscape of cyber threats witnessed a significant shift. While the Cryptocurrency sector was initially leading in terms of the volume of HTTP DDoS attack requests, a new target emerged as a primary victim. The Environmental Services industry experienced an unprecedented surge in HTTP DDoS attacks, with these attacks constituting half of all its HTTP traffic. This marked a staggering 618-fold increase compared to the previous year, highlighting a disturbing trend in the cyber threat landscape.
This surge in cyber attacks coincided with COP 28, which ran from November 30th to December 12th, 2023. The conference was a pivotal event, signaling what many considered the ‘beginning of the end’ for the fossil fuel era. It was observed that in the period leading up to COP 28, there was a noticeable spike in HTTP attacks targeting Environmental Services websites. This pattern wasn’t isolated to this event alone.
Looking back at historical data, particularly during COP 26 and COP 27, as well as other UN environment-related resolutions or announcements, a similar pattern emerges. Each of these events was accompanied by a corresponding increase in cyber attacks aimed at Environmental Services websites.
In February and March 2023, significant environmental events like the UN’s resolution on climate justice and the launch of United Nations Environment Programme’s Freshwater Challenge potentially heightened the profile of environmental websites, possibly correlating with an increase in attacks on these sites.
This recurring pattern underscores the growing intersection between environmental issues and cyber security, a nexus that is increasingly becoming a focal point for attackers in the digital age.
DDoS attacks and Iron Swords
It’s not just UN resolutions that trigger DDoS attacks. Cyber attacks, and particularly DDoS attacks, have long been a tool of war and disruption. We witnessed an increase in DDoS attack activity in the Ukraine-Russia war, and now we’re also witnessing it in the Israel-Hamas war. We first reported the cyber activity in our report Cyber attacks in the Israel-Hamas war, and we continued to monitor the activity throughout Q4.
DDoS attacks targeting Israeli and Palestinian websites, by industry
Relative to each region’s traffic, the Palestinian territories was the second most attacked region by HTTP DDoS attacks in Q4. Over 10% of all HTTP requests towards Palestinian websites were DDoS attacks, a total of 1.3 billion DDoS requests — representing a 1,126% increase in QoQ. 90% of these DDoS attacks targeted Palestinian Banking websites. Another 8% targeted Information Technology and Internet platforms.
Top attacked Palestinian industries
Similarly, our systems automatically mitigated over 2.2 billion HTTP DDoS requests targeting Israeli websites. While 2.2 billion represents a decrease compared to the previous quarter and year, it did amount to a larger percentage out of the total Israel-bound traffic. This normalized figure represents a 27% increase QoQ but a 92% decrease YoY. Notwithstanding the larger amount of attack traffic, Israel was the 77th most attacked region relative to its own traffic. It was also the 33rd most attacked by total volume of attacks, whereas the Palestinian territories was 42nd.
Of those Israeli websites attacked, Newspaper & Media were the main target — receiving almost 40% of all Israel-bound HTTP DDoS attacks. The second most attacked industry was the Computer Software industry. The Banking, Financial Institutions, and Insurance (BFSI) industry came in third.
Top attacked Israeli industries
On the network layer, we see the same trend. Palestinian networks were targeted by 470 terabytes of attack traffic — accounting for over 68% of all traffic towards Palestinian networks. Surpassed only by China, this figure placed the Palestinian territories as the second most attacked region in the world, by network-layer DDoS attack, relative to all Palestinian territories-bound traffic. By absolute volume of traffic, it came in third. Those 470 terabytes accounted for approximately 1% of all DDoS traffic that Cloudflare mitigated.
Israeli networks, though, were targeted by only 2.4 terabytes of attack traffic, placing it as the 8th most attacked country by network-layer DDoS attacks (normalized). Those 2.4 terabytes accounted for almost 10% of all traffic towards Israeli networks.
Top attacked countries
When we turned the picture around, we saw that 3% of all bytes that were ingested in our Israeli-based data centers were network-layer DDoS attacks. In our Palestinian-based data centers, that figure was significantly higher — approximately 17% of all bytes.
On the application layer, we saw that 4% of HTTP requests originating from Palestinian IP addresses were DDoS attacks, and almost 2% of HTTP requests originating from Israeli IP addresses were DDoS attacks as well.
Main sources of DDoS attacks
In the third quarter of 2022, China was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic. However, since the fourth quarter of 2022, the US took the first place as the largest source of HTTP DDoS attacks and has maintained that undesirable position for five consecutive quarters. Similarly, our data centers in the US are the ones ingesting the most network-layer DDoS attack traffic — over 38% of all attack bytes.
HTTP DDoS attacks originating from China and the US by quarter
Together, China and the US account for a little over a quarter of all HTTP DDoS attack traffic in the world. Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, and Argentina account for the next twenty-five percent.
Top source of HTTP DDoS attacks
These large figures usually correspond to large markets. For this reason, we also normalize the attack traffic originating from each country by comparing their outbound traffic. When we do this, we often get small island nations or smaller market countries that a disproportionate amount of attack traffic originates from. In Q4, 40% of Saint Helena’s outbound traffic were HTTP DDoS attacks — placing it at the top. Following the ‘remote volcanic tropical island’, Libya came in second, Swaziland (also known as Eswatini) in third. Argentina and Egypt follow in fourth and fifth place.
Top source of HTTP DDoS attacks with respect to each country’s traffic
On the network layer, Zimbabwe came in first place. Almost 80% of all traffic we ingested in our Zimbabwe-based data center was malicious. In second place, Paraguay, and Madagascar in third.
Top source of Network-layer DDoS attacks with respect to each country’s traffic
Most attacked industries
By volume of attack traffic, Cryptocurrency was the most attacked industry in Q4. Over 330 billion HTTP requests targeted it. This figure accounts for over 4% of all HTTP DDoS traffic for the quarter. The second most attacked industry was Gaming & Gambling. These industries are known for being coveted targets and attract a lot of traffic and attacks.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks
On the network layer, the Information Technology and Internet industry was the most attacked — over 45% of all network-layer DDoS attack traffic was aimed at it. Following far behind were the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Gaming & Gambling, and Telecommunications industries.
Top industries targeted by Network-layer DDoS attacks
To change perspectives, here too, we normalized the attack traffic by the total traffic for a specific industry. When we do that, we get a different picture.
Top attacked industries by HTTP DDoS attacks, by region
We already mentioned in the beginning of this report that the Environmental Services industry was the most attacked relative to its own traffic. In second place was the Packaging and Freight Delivery industry, which is interesting because of its timely correlation with online shopping during Black Friday and the winter holiday season. Purchased gifts and goods need to get to their destination somehow, and it seems as though attackers tried to interfere with that. On a similar note, DDoS attacks on retail companies increased by 16% compared to the previous year.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks with respect to each industry’s traffic
On the network layer, Public Relations and Communications was the most targeted industry — 36% of its traffic was malicious. This too is very interesting given its timing. Public Relations and Communications companies are usually linked to managing public perception and communication. Disrupting their operations can have immediate and widespread reputational impacts which becomes even more critical during the Q4 holiday season. This quarter often sees increased PR and communication activities due to holidays, end-of-year summaries, and preparation for the new year, making it a critical operational period — one that some may want to disrupt.
Top industries targeted by Network-layer DDoS attacks with respect to each industry’s traffic
Most attacked countries and regions
Singapore was the main target of HTTP DDoS attacks in Q4. Over 317 billion HTTP requests, 4% of all global DDoS traffic, were aimed at Singaporean websites. The US followed closely in second and Canada in third. Taiwan came in as the fourth most attacked region — amidst the upcoming general elections and the tensions with China. Taiwan-bound attacks in Q4 traffic increased by 847% compared to the previous year, and 2,858% compared to the previous quarter. This increase is not limited to the absolute values. When normalized, the percentage of HTTP DDoS attack traffic targeting Taiwan relative to all Taiwan-bound traffic also significantly increased. It increased by 624% quarter-over-quarter and 3,370% year-over-year.
Top targeted countries by HTTP DDoS attacks
While China came in as the ninth most attacked country by HTTP DDoS attacks, it’s the number one most attacked country by network-layer attacks. 45% of all network-layer DDoS traffic that Cloudflare mitigated globally was China-bound. The rest of the countries were so far behind that it is almost negligible.
Top targeted countries by Network-layer DDoS attacks
When normalizing the data, Iraq, Palestinian territories, and Morocco take the lead as the most attacked regions with respect to their total inbound traffic. What’s interesting is that Singapore comes up as fourth. So not only did Singapore face the largest amount of HTTP DDoS attack traffic, but that traffic also made up a significant amount of the total Singapore-bound traffic. By contrast, the US was second most attacked by volume (per the application-layer graph above), but came in the fiftieth place with respect to the total US-bound traffic.
Top targeted countries by HTTP DDoS attacks with respect to each country’s traffic
Similar to Singapore, but arguably more dramatic, China is both the number one most attacked country by network-layer DDoS attack traffic, and also with respect to all China-bound traffic. Almost 86% of all China-bound traffic was mitigated by Cloudflare as network-layer DDoS attacks. The Palestinian territories, Brazil, Norway, and again Singapore followed with large percentages of attack traffic.
Top targeted countries by Network-layer DDoS attacks with respect to each country’s traffic
Attack vectors and attributes
The majority of DDoS attacks are short and small relative to Cloudflare’s scale. However, unprotected websites and networks can still suffer disruption from short and small attacks without proper inline automated protection — underscoring the need for organizations to be proactive in adopting a robust security posture.
In 2023 Q4, 91% of attacks ended within 10 minutes, 97% peaked below 500 megabits per second (mbps), and 88% never exceeded 50 thousand packets per second (pps).
Two out of every 100 network-layer DDoS attacks lasted more than an hour, and exceeded 1 gigabit per second (gbps). One out of every 100 attacks exceeded 1 million packets per second. Furthermore, the amount of network-layer DDoS attacks exceeding 100 million packets per second increased by 15% quarter-over-quarter.
DDoS attack stats you should know
One of those large attacks was a Mirai-botnet attack that peaked at 160 million packets per second. The packet per second rate was not the largest we’ve ever seen. The largest we’ve ever seen was 754 million packets per second. That attack occurred in 2020, and we have yet to see anything larger.
This more recent attack, though, was unique in its bits per second rate. This was the largest network-layer DDoS attack we’ve seen in Q4. It peaked at 1.9 terabits per second and originated from a Mirai botnet. It was a multi-vector attack, meaning it combined multiple attack methods. Some of those methods included UDP fragments flood, UDP/Echo flood, SYN Flood, ACK Flood, and TCP malformed flags.
This attack targeted a known European Cloud Provider and originated from over 18 thousand unique IP addresses that are assumed to be spoofed. It was automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s defenses.
This goes to show that even the largest attacks end very quickly. Previous large attacks we’ve seen ended within seconds — underlining the need for an in-line automated defense system. Though still rare, attacks in the terabit range are becoming more and more prominent.
1.9 Terabit per second Mirai DDoS attacks
The use of Mirai-variant botnets is still very common. In Q4, almost 3% of all attacks originate from Mirai. Though, of all attack methods, DNS-based attacks remain the attackers’ favorite. Together, DNS Floods and DNS Amplification attacks account for almost 53% of all attacks in Q4. SYN Flood follows in second and UDP floods in third. We’ll cover the two DNS attack types here, and you can visit the hyperlinks to learn more about UDP and SYN floods in our Learning Center.
DNS floods and amplification attacks
DNS floods and DNS amplification attacks both exploit the Domain Name System (DNS), but they operate differently. DNS is like a phone book for the Internet, translating human-friendly domain names like “www.cloudfare.com” into numerical IP addresses that computers use to identify each other on the network.
Simply put, DNS-based DDoS attacks comprise the method computers and servers used to identify one another to cause an outage or disruption, without actually ‘taking down’ a server. For example, a server may be up and running, but the DNS server is down. So clients won’t be able to connect to it and will experience it as an outage.
A DNS flood attack bombards a DNS server with an overwhelming number of DNS queries. This is usually done using a DDoS botnet. The sheer volume of queries can overwhelm the DNS server, making it difficult or impossible for it to respond to legitimate queries. This can result in the aforementioned service disruptions, delays or even an outage for those trying to access the websites or services that rely on the targeted DNS server.
On the other hand, a DNS amplification attack involves sending a small query with a spoofed IP address (the address of the victim) to a DNS server. The trick here is that the DNS response is significantly larger than the request. The server then sends this large response to the victim’s IP address. By exploiting open DNS resolvers, the attacker can amplify the volume of traffic sent to the victim, leading to a much more significant impact. This type of attack not only disrupts the victim but also can congest entire networks.
In both cases, the attacks exploit the critical role of DNS in network operations. Mitigation strategies typically include securing DNS servers against misuse, implementing rate limiting to manage traffic, and filtering DNS traffic to identify and block malicious requests.
Top attack vectors
Amongst the emerging threats we track, we recorded a 1,161% increase in ACK-RST Floods as well as a 515% increase in CLDAP floods, and a 243% increase in SPSS floods, in each case as compared to last quarter. Let’s walk through some of these attacks and how they’re meant to cause disruption.
Top emerging attack vectors
ACK-RST floods
An ACK-RST Flood exploits the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by sending numerous ACK and RST packets to the victim. This overwhelms the victim’s ability to process and respond to these packets, leading to service disruption. The attack is effective because each ACK or RST packet prompts a response from the victim’s system, consuming its resources. ACK-RST Floods are often difficult to filter since they mimic legitimate traffic, making detection and mitigation challenging.
CLDAP floods
CLDAP (Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a variant of LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). It’s used for querying and modifying directory services running over IP networks. CLDAP is connectionless, using UDP instead of TCP, making it faster but less reliable. Because it uses UDP, there’s no handshake requirement which allows attackers to spoof the IP address thus allowing attackers to exploit it as a reflection vector. In these attacks, small queries are sent with a spoofed source IP address (the victim’s IP), causing servers to send large responses to the victim, overwhelming it. Mitigation involves filtering and monitoring unusual CLDAP traffic.
SPSS floods
Floods abusing the SPSS (Source Port Service Sweep) protocol is a network attack method that involves sending packets from numerous random or spoofed source ports to various destination ports on a targeted system or network. The aim of this attack is two-fold: first, to overwhelm the victim’s processing capabilities, causing service disruptions or network outages, and second, it can be used to scan for open ports and identify vulnerable services. The flood is achieved by sending a large volume of packets, which can saturate the victim’s network resources and exhaust the capacities of its firewalls and intrusion detection systems. To mitigate such attacks, it’s essential to leverage in-line automated detection capabilities.
Cloudflare is here to help – no matter the attack type, size, or duration
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet, and we believe that a better Internet is one that is secure, performant, and available to all. No matter the attack type, the attack size, the attack duration or the motivation behind the attack, Cloudflare’s defenses stand strong. Since we pioneered unmetered DDoS Protection in 2017, we’ve made and kept our commitment to make enterprise-grade DDoS protection free for all organizations alike — and of course, without compromising performance. This is made possible by our unique technology and robust network architecture.
It’s important to remember that security is a process, not a single product or flip of a switch. Atop of our automated DDoS protection systems, we offer comprehensive bundled features such as firewall, bot detection, API protection, and caching to bolster your defenses. Our multi-layered approach optimizes your security posture and minimizes potential impact. We’ve also put together a list of recommendations to help you optimize your defenses against DDoS attacks, and you can follow our step-by-step wizards to secure your applications and prevent DDoS attacks. And, if you’d like to benefit from our easy to use, best-in-class protection against DDoS and other attacks on the Internet, you can sign up — for free! — at cloudflare.com. If you’re under attack, register or call the cyber emergency hotline number shown here for a rapid response.
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To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you’re looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.
WRITTEN BY THE CLOUDINARY TEAM FEB-07-2023 7 MIN READ
Post-pandemic, consumer reliance on online shopping remains steady, meaning e-commerce businesses need to continue to adopt new technologies to scale their business operations.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) software can make it easier for creators to store, search, and organize their assets. Unfortunately, legacy DAM solutions are no longer sufficient to manage large volumes of product-related content. After all, using ‘old school’ DAM software requires a large staff who can manually optimize media and customize experiences for their audience—a practice that goes against agile methodology.
Staying competitive in today’s e-commerce environment requires brands to harness the power of AI and the efficiency of automation. A business using AI can quickly match audiences to relevant products and edit assets on the fly, creating more convenient and personalized shopping experiences. On the back-end, automation simplifies asset management, saving time and resources while increasing sales efficiency and marketing effectiveness.
During the pandemic, the US saw a 50% increase in e-commerce sales. This rapid shift to online shopping forced many businesses to find new asset management solutions. The right tool saves time for creative teams by taking on the labor involved in cropping, tagging, recoloring, background removal, and numerous other tedious tasks. AI tools can also automate higher-level functions, performing object recognition and asset categorization and efficiently organizing even legacy datasets.
Together, these tools free up a marketing team to address more strategic concerns, like finding opportunities to generate interest across new sales channels and touchpoints.
E-commerce activity generates a lot of data that can be used for discovery. However, creators and developers can’t use what they can’t access, and studies show that 73% of data is never used for analytics. This wasted data is more than just lost revenue: Storing and transmitting data is expensive and also poses environmental concerns. To optimize asset delivery and extract the most valuable data from e-commerce activity, businesses must enhance their DAM tools with AI and automation.
Let’s look at how AI and automation can help an e-commerce business achieve greater customer satisfaction, higher revenue, lower costs, happier employees, and more efficient and agile business operations.
Many websites collect cookies to track their customers’ buying patterns and enable personalized product recommendations. AI can analyze this information, so we can use it to automate outreach and customize customer campaigns and newsletters.
Effective tools can provide extensible APIs to automate DAM and target specific user segments and devices. For example, Cloudinary’s Admin API lets you retrieve and manipulate asset metadata as part of an automated pipeline. In conjunction with Cloudinary’s object detection tools, it’s a powerful tool to modernize legacy databases.
Most companies offer flexible return policies to stay competitive in a market where customers cannot appraise a product in person before purchase. It’s expensive to provide the customer with this freedom—product returns cost companies millions of dollars annually.
One of the most common reasons customers return products is because they feel they’ve received something different than what they saw before purchase, which could occur if the product page had insufficient photos or poor-quality images. For an e-commerce retailer, saving money by taking fewer photos is a false economy; a loss of revenue and the cost of processing returns can offset any savings.
AI-powered content creation helps ensure customers are happy with their purchases. For example, Cloudinary’s image and video transformation API provides a suite of tools to generate high-quality derivative assets from a small number of product images. For example, suppose you’re selling a sweater in a range of colors. Cloudinary’s image transformation API enables us to recolor a photo of it, so the product team only needs to photograph it once.
AI is also a powerful tool for matching visitors to the products they’re most likely to buy. By combining in-session user behavior patterns with cookies, an AI-based system can recommend appropriately sized clothing that matches the customer’s style.
Then, when a potential buyer is matched to a product, we can use AI-powered tools to generate interest. For example, on Mazda’s purchase page, customers can apply 3D model transformation functions to create a 360-degree view of their vehicle build with all the personalized upgrade options and the color they’ve selected.
AI also enables customers to preview personalized products. If a clothing retailer offers the option to add a custom inscription or design, for example, then an AI-powered displacement map can show what the final product will look like much more clearly than a simple overlay.
We can implement much of this functionality with a tool like Cloudinary’s content-aware object detection add-on. When used alongside the AI-powered background removal tool, we can generate and edit image assets for any context. For instance, consider an automotive manufacturer with a database of automotive add-ons. An AI could analyze image assets and apply smart tags to categorize product options. If the manufacturer offers numerous upgrade options across a range of a dozen or more vehicles, this will save a lot of time and work. The technology can even help with cleaning up legacy databases and regaining control over lost or mislabeled assets.
A well-organized asset database also creates happier customers. Suppose visitors to our storefront have access to a search field or chatbot for queries. In that case, we can combine this data with user behavior data we collected earlier and compare it against our meticulously and automatically tagged and organized product catalog.
As we integrate AI tools more deeply into our supply chain, we can also expect more efficient fulfillment as we optimize for customer preference, location, and even local weather. For example, we can integrate Cloudinary-managed assets with Next.js Middleware in Netlify to find out where visitors are located and inject shipping information. If customers find the status updates useful, they’re more likely to become repeat buyers.
AI also helps build customer trust. AI-powered tools can automatically synchronize sales across multiple devices, identify high-risk transactions, and offer discounts to loyal customers more intelligently than rule-based implementations would. We can even use virtual assistants to handle administrative tasks that impact the end-user experience.
For example, AI can help a storefront become more responsive by determining which media assets should be cached locally in a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or by identifying the most routine customer queries and offloading them to automated chatbots. An apparel storefront can provide a more bespoke experience by offering AI-powered fit and sizing assistance or even suggestions for complementary wardrobe choices.
When a customer decides to purchase, AI can help us ensure we’ve minimized human error in the inventory handling and fulfillment stages. If our product has a loyal following, we can keep customers engaged by providing AI-optimized, up-to-date stock arrival notifications.
If we allow end users to create their own content, such as photos in product reviews (or if we’re using AI to pull from external content stores), we should use a tool like Cloudinary’s asset moderation. Depending on the type and volume of content, we can configure these add-ons to flag content for manual or automatic review or a combination of both. For instance, we might want to automatically reject some content, such as low-quality images or images that have not been anonymized. Other content might need human approval, such as automatically smart-tagged product images.
To be competitive in sales within a digital ecosystem, you often need to analyze trends in external data. AI tools help us stay competitive with comprehensive industry monitoring and analysis. Rather than manually searching for a competitive edge, we can feed raw data into our models and expect better insights—notably, often without needing to perform the tedious process of data normalization.
Another common necessity of e-commerce businesses—namely, complex integrations—can break continuity between upstream and downstream portions of the sales pipeline, especially when integrating legacy applications. This process can create extra work and delays for the sales team, who either have to troubleshoot integrations or rely on support teams or developer teams to make changes. AI-powered automation can solve this issue and create a more extensible and easy-to-use pipeline for the sales team.
In an e-commerce business, payroll, accounting, and invoicing are all digital (and often cloud-first) processes. This makes them ideally suited to administrative automation and AI.
Cloudinary’s broad set of integrations enables Cloudinary-managed assets to be deployed through commercial platforms, like Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) or Salesforce. We get the benefits of the financial tooling of top e-commerce and marketing frameworks while delivering quality, relevant content that’s been automatically curated by asset management technologies.
To grow an e-commerce business in a cloud-first world, you need the help of cutting-edge technologies. In the DAM space, AI can make the difference between a digital storefront that needs constant manual labor to stay effective and an e-commerce business that’s ready to sail the tide of internet commerce. To start integrating AI into your business plan, visit Cloudinary today.
Spam registrations are common on WordPress websites. WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, with over 60 percent market share. This makes it a prime target for scammers. It’s also, unfortunately, easy to create fake user accounts on the platform, requiring only an account name, email address, and password – all things spammers can simply invent.
Fake registrations can cause extensive issues, such as hogging resources, spreading malware, and creating an unmanageable user base.
WordPress doesn’t have a default functionality to combat spam user registrations, butthe good news is that plugins like Shield Security PRO can fill in the gap. Let’s take a look at some strategies for preventing spam user registrations.
Introduction to spam registrations in WordPress
WordPress spam registrations are when spammers create accounts on sites without any intention of using them for authentic purposes. Typically, spammers use automated programs or bots to create these accounts. Spammers may also use bots and spam accounts for phishing purposes, trying to acquire sensitive information from users and webmasters to compromise their security.
Website owners often underestimate the harm spam registrations can cause. These range from immediate annoyances to long-term security problems and data distortion.
For example, spam registrations can clog your inbox, causing surges of email notifications informing you of fake sign-ups for your website. Processing and deleting these emails and accounts without getting rid of legitimate users is time-consuming and challenging.
Spam registrations can also overload server resources, affecting performance. Spam bots can make frequent login attempts, using up your bandwidth and making your website run slower for legitimate users.
There can also be some considerable long-term consequences. Users may tire of spam comments and stop interacting with your content. You may also struggle to analyse user data, distorting your view of how your site is functioning. This can lead to security vulnerabilities and damage your site’s SEO.
Strategies to prevent WordPress user registration spam
This section covers various strategies and techniques that you can implement to prevent new user registration spam and improve the overall security of your WordPress site.
Install a WordPress security plugin
The first strategy is to install a WordPress security plugin. Choosing the right security plugin not only helps prevent spam registrations on your WordPress site, but it also gives you access to a wide range of security features.
Shield Security PRO is the best plugin for improving the overall security of your WordPress site. The plugin’s key features include bad bot detection and blocking, invisible CAPTCHA codes, human and bot spam prevention, traffic rate limiting, and malware scanning.
Here’s a rundown of Shield Security PRO’s features and how they can help protect your site:
CrowdSec Integration – crowdsourced IP Block lists that contain known IPs of bots & spammers that are instantly blocked access.
Disable WordPress registration
Using a plugin like ShieldPRO is the best choice to ensure the ongoing security of your WordPress site. However, there are also manual methods you can employ to help prevent user registration spam.
Disabling user registration in WordPress is one strategy. This approach eliminates the problem of spam signups entirely. You could try this option if you don’t need to collect user information, run a website with limited resources, or simply want to provide audiences with information for free.
The steps to disable registration on your WordPress site are as follows:
From the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > General.
Next, go to “Membership” and uncheck the “Anyone can register” box.
It’s worth considering that this technique prevents you from collecting visitor details, which stops you from building email lists or marketing directly to your audience. It also reduces personalisation opportunities and limits community building.
Add CAPTCHA to your user registration form
You can also try adding CAPTCHA to your user registration form. This prevents automated spam registrations by identifying bots before they can create accounts.
Various forms of CAPTCHA plugins for your site exist, including:
reCAPTCHA: Google reCAPTCHA is a free service that combines text and images in a user-friendly interface, designed to weed out bots
hCAPTCHA: hCAPTCHA is a free service that uses images and action-based tests to identify bots. This service is customisable and prioritises user privacy.
ShieldPRO’s AntiBot Detection Engine (ADE) avoids the need to use CAPTCHA at all. Since the plugin automatically detects and blocks bots, there’s no reason to test your visitors for signs of nuts and bolts.
Implement geoblocking
You can also try geoblocking, a security method that limits website access to specific regions. It works by filtering IP addresses by location, only letting specific IPs enter the site.
Geoblocking prevents spam from regions known for high levels of malicious activity. However, it also comes with various drawbacks. For example, it causes false positives, blocking legitimate site users just because they are in the wrong country. Spammers can also bypass it with proxy sites and VPNs.
Fortunately, ShieldPRO’s automated IP blocking technology more accurately and effectively stops spam users by blocking them after a specified number of offences. It detects malicious activity regardless of the traffic’s origin.
Require manual approval for user registration
Manual user approvals can also mitigate spam registrations, offering significant benefits. The approach drastically reduces the chances of bot sign-up while also permitting you to collect legitimate user details.
Drawbacks include the time-intensive nature of this method and the lack of scalability for larger WordPress sites. You may need to hire multiple full-time operatives to manage website administration, which can get pricey, fast.
Turn on email activation for user registration
Email activation for user registration is another popular technique to guard against spam registrations. It works by getting users to click a link in their email account to verify their details.
Shield Security PRO features a built-in email-checking feature. This tests to see if the email has a valid structure and is registered to a legitimate domain. It also checks if there are any mail exchange records for the domain, and determines if the email address goes to a disposable domain. These checks help to flag fake and temporary email addresses in user registrations.
Block spam IP addresses
One of the primary ways Shield Security PRO works is by blocking malicious IP addresses once they’ve behaved badly enough to qualify as a bot. There is no one clear action an IP address can do on your site that proves it’s a bot. However, certain patterns of behaviour give bots away clear as day.
“When you look at the activity as a whole” says Paul Goodchild, creator of Shield Security PRO, “a bot’s activity on a site is clearly distinguishable from human users.”
The plugin then uses this clear indication as a signal to block the IP address entirely, stopping malicious activity in its tracks. The plugin also uses CrowdSec technology to minimise the risk of false positives and enable as many legitimate sign-ups as possible.
Secure your WordPress site with ShieldPRO today
The damaging impact of spam user registrations can be substantial. It can cause clogged inboxes, distorted user analytics, and server overload. The long-term consequences are diminished website SEO, reputational damage, and security vulnerabilities due to phishing and malware.
Fortunately, there are various methods to prevent spam user registrations on WordPress websites. The most effective option is to use a plugin like Shield SecurityPRO. This plugin keeps malicious bots off your website. Since most spam user registrations come from bots, this means you can rest a lot easier.
If you’re curious about ShieldPRO and would like to explore the powerful features for protecting your WordPress sites, click here to get started today. (14-day satisfaction guarantee!)
You’ll get all PRO features, including AI Malware Scanning, WP Config File Protection, Plugin and Theme File Guard, import/export, exclusive customer support, and so much more.
This article helps answer frequently asked questions regarding SonicOS 7.1.1.
Q. What is SonicOS 7.1.1? A. SonicOS 7.1.1 is the feature release available on all Gen 7 firewalls which brings in new capabilities around security, content filtering, integrations and virtual platforms.
Q. Will we be able to manage SonicOS 7.1 from NSM 2.3.5? A. NSM 2.3.5 will not support SonicOS 7.1. The support for SonicOS 7.1 will be available from NSM 2.4.0, which will be released early next year (2024). Please read the following article on NSM Compatibility with SonicOS 7.1.
Q. What are the new features available on SonicOS 7.1.1? A. The major features implemented in SonicOS 7.1.1 are DNS Filtering, reputation-based content filtering, Wi-Fi 6 access-point management, Network Access Control (NAC) integration with Aruba ClearPass, NSv bootstrapping, auto-update firmware and some other enhancements with storage and user interface (UI) for ease of use.
Q. How can existing firewall customers running SonicOS 7 upgrade/migrate to SonicOS 7.1.1? A. You can upgrade the firewall to SonicOS 7.1 on box without using a migration tool.
Q. How can existing firewall customers running SonicOS6.5 and previous versions upgrade to SonicOS 7.1.1? A. Users will be required to make use of our Secure Upgrade Program to upgrade their existing hardware models to Gen 7. They will then need to migrate their settings to the new firewall running 7.1.1 OS Learn more about the Secure Upgrade Program
Q. Are there any new features in 7.1.1 that will require new licenses? A. The DNS Filtering feature is a licensed feature that will be available as an a la carte license for Gen 7 firewalls without the APSS bundle.
Q. Do I need any additional licensing if I already have the APSS license available on my current Gen 7 firewall? A. No.
Q. Can I perform a firmware/OS upgrade on my existing NSv NGFW running SonicOS 7.1.1? A. The downgrade of firmware from SonicOS 7.1 to SonicOS 7.0 is not supported. Please refer to this article when upgrading your firewall: How can I upgrade SonicOS Firmware?
Q. Is there any change in behavior with regard to Policy Mode with 7.1.1? A. There is no change in behavior with regard to Policy Mode in SonicOS 7.1.1. The NSv 270, 470 and 870 will continue to support both Global and Policy Mode. The NSsp15700 will continue to support only Policy Mode.
Q. What is CFS 5.0? How does it differ from CFS 4.0? A. Content Filtering Service 5.0 brings category extension with CFS 4.0. SonicOS 7.0.1 supported 64 categories and that has been increased to 89. Content Filtering 5.0 brings in performance improvements along with reputation-based blocking.
Q. What is upgrade behavior when a user upgrades from SonicOS 7.0.1 to SonicOS 7.1.1 with regard to CFS policies? A. There will be no impact on the existing CFS policies, however as CFS 5.0 brings in reputation-based blocking, users will be required to configure the CFS policies with the new reputation parameter in CFS 5.0. Please refer to this upgrade article.
Q. Can we downgrade the firewall from SonicOS 7.1 to SonicOS 7.0? A. The downgrade of firmware from SonicOS 7.1 to SonicOS 7.0 is not supported. Please refer to this article when upgrading your firewall.
Q. What is DNS Filtering? How is it different from the current DNS capabilities in SonicOS 7.0.1? A. DNS Filtering inspects the DNS traffic in real time and provides the ability to block threats and access to malicious websites. DNS Filtering blocks threats before they can reach your network. The DNS security capabilities on 7.0.1 include DNS Tunnel Detection and DNS Sinkholes. Please read DNS Security to understand them in detail.
Q. What is the upgrade behavior when users upgrade from SonicOS 7.0.1 to SonicOS 7.1.1 with regard to DNS proxy and sink-holing? A. The upgrade from SonicOS 7.0.1 to SonicOS 7.1.1 would have no impact on the behavior that was there previous to the SonicOS 7.1 upgrade.
Q. What does the NAC integration feature do? A. SonicWall Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) provide Restful threat API which integrates with Aruba ClearPass as network access control (NAC). ClearPass can pass the security context vectors using the restful API which is included with SonicWall NGFWs. ClearPass can pass security context vectors including Source IP, Source MAC, User ID, User Role, Domain, Device Category, Device Family, Device Name, OS Type, Hostname and Health Posture to SonicWall NGFWs to enforce real-time rules based on Device Type, OS and Device Health Posture at every point of control. When an alert is generated on a client machine, it can be shared by ClearPass to SonicWall NGFWs which would trigger a range of predetermined, policy-based actions from quarantine to blocking.
Q. Does this NAC integration feature work with any NAC providers? A. No, this NAC integration only works with Aruba ClearPass.
Q. Which access point models can I integrate with firewalls running SonicOS 7.1.1? A. With the launch of SonicOS 7.1.1, users will now also be able to integrate and manage Wi-Fi 6 APs like 621, 641 and 681.
Q. How can I automate NSv deployment using the bootstrapping feature? Which platforms support this feature? Bootstrapping helps with NSv automated deployments. Token-based registration will help ease the bootstrapping process. KVM already supported bootstrapping in SonicOS 7.0.1. With the launch of 7.1.1, other platforms like VMWare, Hyper-V, AWS and Azure will also support bootstrapping features.
Q. How is the bootstrapping process different between private cloud and public cloud? A. The bootstrapping process is not different between private cloud and public cloud. SonicOS supports bootstrapping on AWS, Azure, VMware, KVM and Hyper-V.
Q. What are the new parameters that will be stored in secondary storage modules with the launch of 7.1.1? A. TSR , exp, PCAP, threat logs and appflow logs will be stored in the secondary storage module as part of SonicOS 7.1.1
Q. Will the new features available in SonicOS 7.1.1 be available in the Capture Threat Assessment (CTA) report? A. During the launch, the new features in SonicOS 7.1.1 will not be included in the CTA report.
Q. Are the new features available on NSM? A. Yes. The upcoming NSM version 2.4 is planned to support the new features on SonicOS 7.1.1.
Q. Can I manage SonicOS 7.1.1 on the previous versions of NSM (prior to 2.4)? A. You can upgrade the SonicOS version to 7.1.1, but the new features which are part of 7.1.1 will not be available on NSM versions prior to 2.4
Q. What are the best practices to be followed on SonicOS 7.1.1? A. Please follow the best practices when upgrading the firewall from SonicOS 7.0.1 to SonicOS 7.1 documented here.
The migration tool is not required for the configuration migration from SonicOS 7.0 to SonicOS 7.1. Any customer migrating from Gen 6 to SonicOS 7.1 would need to upgrade to SonicOS 7.0.1 using the migration tool and then migrate to SonicOS 7.1.
DNS Filtering is the first line of defense and works independent of Content Filtering Services (CFS). Please follow the admin guides for seamless configuration with best practices.
Q. What is the new website for URL rating and reputation lookup with CFS 5.0? A. https://cfssupportapi.global.sonicwall.com/
Q. How can I check the URL rating on the firewall UI? A. Device –> Diagnostics –> URL Rating Request Tool
Q. What is the performance impact of enabling the new SonicOS 7.1 features on an existing firewall? A. We do not expect there to be any impact on the performance of an existing firewall because of new features.
Q. Can DNS proxy 4to4 and 4to6 features work alongside DNS filtering? Can this be accomplished by adding an additional DNS proxy-only rule alongside a DNS filtering rule for X0 Interface? If so, what will take precedence/priority? A. DNS rules give the choice of either proxy or filtering on a single rule. When proxy is enabled, Client 4to4 or 4to6 DNS queries can be proxied. When DNS filtering is enabled, only Client 4to4 Requests DNS queries will be proxied and filtered. —While DNS proxies will process both DNS TCP and DNS UDP, DNS filtering is only for DNS UDP. —Both proxy or filtering DNS rules can be stacked, the most specific match will be applied, and the lookup precedence/priority is top-down. —To have DNS proxy 4to6 alongside DNS filtering, the proxy rule must explicitly have source zone and address of the 4to6 Clients for the traffic to hit the rule and the policy to be applied
Q. Can DNS Filtering be applied on custom zones or is it restricted to default zones, LAN, DMZ and WLAN? A. DNS Filtering can be applied to LAN, DMZ and WLAN zones as well as custom zones with Trusted, Public and Wireless Security Types.
Q. How long does a cache entry last before we request a category for a specific domain again? A. The cache entry of a domain would depend on the TTL of the domain.
Q. Are there plans to support DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS? A. Yes. DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS will be available in a future release.
Q. Will the DNS Filtering license be included with any existing bundle or does the customer need to buy it separately? A. DNS Filtering will be available with APSS and there will be a la carte SKUs for EPSS, TPSS and HW only.
Q. What happens to the WNM managed access-point when the firewall is upgraded to SonicOS 7.1?
A. Please note that if you have 600 series access points on the network connected to a WLAN zone of a firewall with 7.0.x managed by WNM, after the update to 7.1 the access points will be acquired by the firewall. All WNM settings will not be available. Please “Disable SonicPoint/SonicWave management” on the WLAN zone for seamless management.
What is the minimum recommended length of twisted pair copper cable that I should use with my SonicWall firewalls’ HA ports for high availability?
Resolution
Question:
What is the minimum recommended length of twisted pair copper cable that I should use with my SonicWall firewalls’ HA ports for high availability?
Answer:
At present, there is no officially published minimum length for a twisted pair cable from IEEE or ANSI, though there is information about maximum lengths for twisted pair cable.
However, sometimes customers want to use a cable that is only several inches in length for this. The reason why is because it looks neat and tidy, and it’s one less cable that has to be strung through a rackmount cable channel. However, using such a small cable often causes problems. Customers have reported issues where the firewalls appear to lock up, and they can neither be managed, nor can they pass traffic.
The reason why this occurs, is because the extremely short HA cable causes problems with the transmissions of the HA heartbeats. In an HA pair, when the idle unit does not receive heartbeats for the configured interval and time threshold, it will go active. However, if the other unit in the HA pair is still active, both units’ interfaces will be competing for the addressing, which means there is an IP conflict between all of each firewall’s interfaces. This will prevent the devices from being managed, and it will also prevent them from passing traffic.
With regards to cable length, the following needs to be considered: — 1.) Crosstalk
Crosstalk is when a signal sent on one circuit interferes with another signal sent on a separate but adjacent circuit. This is usually caused by circuits being close together. With ethernet cabling, this effect is reduced by twisting the circuit pairs. This reduces the circuits’ ability to interfere with one another while traveling the length of the copper media. With an extremely short cable, there is usually not enough twisted pair to prevent crosstalk interference.
2.) Return Loss
Return loss is essentially the loss of a signal’s power which is returned or reflected by a discontinuity in the cabling (ie: a point in the transmission line where the signal cannot conduct fully to the next leg of the pathway). It is desirable to have a high level of return loss (ie: the loss of reflectivity). Low return loss can be caused by problems at the termination point of the cable, or by a device which is in line with the transmission pathway. A shorter cable presents a potential for lower return loss, because there is less wire to degrade the reflection of signals.
3.) Cable Quality
The quality of cabling will vary from vendor to vendor, depending upon how accurate the equipment is which is used in the manufacturing process. Some vendors do not twist their cabling as effeciently as others do, and some have lower-quality crimps than others. Cables which are crimped by individuals often suffer greatly by comparison to manufactured cables, as one can only be so precise with a hand-crimping tool. The most common problem with custom cables is a loss of twisting near the termination point of the cable. Most vendors who make cables less than half of 1 meter in length do not have those cables certified by any standards body.
For high availability, SonicWall support recommends using a patch or crossover (NSA units have MDIx autosensing capabilities on their interfaces) cable which is no shorter than 1 meter in length (about three feet). There are many posted discussions on this topic available to read online, however, this post from a Fluke Networks employee at forucms.bicsi.org sums up these discussions very well.
http://forums.bicsi.org/Topic2210-4-1.aspx#bm2215 —- “If you are talking specifically about patch cords, then 0.5 m is the implied minimum length in ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1 for a certified patch cord. That’s because the math for the limit lines really does not work below this. Infact, getting a certified patch cord of 0.5 is going to be tricky. Many vendors only offer a certified patch cord of 1.0 m or longer.”
