Server Hog - Internet Era

Internet Era

In the internet era, the nature of server loads greatly changed, as the clients became increasingly dispersed geographically, and often increasingly anonymous, as for example, any member of the public with internet access can request a web server in any part of the world to deliver a web page. In this context, a server hog most commonly designates a malicious server hog--a program written expressly for the purpose of overloading a remote server with excessive requests or excessively difficult requests (such as complex search). Use of a deliberate server hog is known as a denial-of-service attack, a behaviour exhibited by many viruses, worms and trojan horses. It is also possible for a petulant or vindictive computer user to manually overload a remote server by unleashing a crap flood.