Mastodawn

Dan Luu Jul 25, 2024

What's up with execs complaining that people are using their website at objectively low rates?

We previously discussed the CTO & CEO of Discourse ($21M raised) getting mad at 0.5 QPS, calling this "an attack", etc. : https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111064835112616061.

Now, the CEO of iFixit (supposedly ~$50M/yr revenue) calls 11 QPS, "abuse", saying "you're tying up our devops resources", implying it's reasonable for a $50M/yr regularly viral web property to need significant intervention if traffic increases by 11 QPS.

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Dan Luu Jul 25, 2024

I guess this is the flip side of those ads you see at the airport which say something like "We TWO MILLION transactions per day", as if it's inherently impressive that some random company can handle 20 QPS.

BTW, I find the 2nd complaint the guy has at least potentially defensible (maybe the courts will decide if it's legally valid or not), but the most viral complaint is ONE MEEEELION hits a day. Which just isn't a lot.

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Trev Hunter

@danluu There's a couple of things to consider here:

1. Bots (especially bad ones) do not behave like real users. They can be bursty, and don't have dwell time, so averaging 1M requests out to 11 QPS isn't a good way of evaluating their impact. It can be orders of magnitude higher.

2. I've seen reports that bots make up around 50% of all traffic and personally have seen bot traffic on ecommerce sites reach 90% (primarily price scraping attempts). More bots piling on is a problem.