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Yes @ 444 (https://http.cat/status/444). That’s indeed the lightest-weight option.

> You have an image on your error page, which some crappy bots will download over and over again.

Most bots won’t download subresources (almost none of them do, actually). The HTML page itself is lean (475 bytes); the image is an Easter egg for humans ;-) Moreover, I use a caching CDN (Cloudflare).

Beware of nginx 444 if your webserver is behind a load balancer.

The LB will see the unresponded requests and think your webserver is failing.

Ideal would be to respond at the webserver and let the LB drop the response.

Does it also tell the kernel to drop the socket? Or is a TCP FIN packet still sent?

Be better if the scraper is left waiting for a packet that'll never arrive (till it times out obviously)