@announcements

Yesterday later afternoon, our site experienced a massive traffic spike, sustaining almost 1Gbps for about 50 minutes.

What happened?
Our diagnostic tools revealed that a single IP address was stuck in a high-speed loop, requesting a single video file over 54,000 times in just 50 minutes—an average of more than 1,000 requests per minute. This was likely a broken client or an aggressive scraper.

Why there was no impact on you:
Crucially, there was no performance impact on other users. Because of our multi-layered Nginx caching, these requests were served directly from memory cache. This prevented the spike from ever reaching our Ruby/Puma application servers, keeping the site fast and responsive for everyone else while we identified the culprit.

This event was a perfect stress test for our new server environment, and it passed with flying colors.
Thanks for being part of SFBA! 🌉