When users are using the rest api interface with a folder, the depth limit allows very large amounts of data to be returned, which can overload Jenkins.

There is no way to stop this in Jenkins, only by using apache in front of Jenkins and blocking patterns and query strings is this possible.

CB published an article on how to use tree to limit this

https://www.cloudbees.com/blog/taming-jenkins-json-api-depth-and-tree