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OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second (blog.hyperknot.com)

609 points by hyperknot · 353 days ago · 133 comments on HN

Article summary

The OpenFreeMap service experienced an unexpected surge in traffic, reaching 100,000 requests per second, due to a new collaborative drawing website called Wplace.live. The service's architecture and Cloudflare's CDN helped it survive the load, with 96% of requests being successful. The author of OpenFreeMap was surprised by the traffic and had to create a Cloudflare rule to limit the traffic from Wplace.live. The author is now considering implementing bandwidth limiting by referer to prevent similar situations in the future.

Main themes

  • Scalability and traffic management
  • Cloudflare and CDN performance
  • Open-source mapping services
  • Traffic spikes and viral content
  • Bandwidth limiting and rate limiting

What commenters say

  • The author of OpenFreeMap handled the situation well by working with the Wplace.live team to find a solution and implementing a Cloudflare rule to limit traffic.
  • Some commenters believe that OpenFreeMap's author should not have blamed Wplace.live for the traffic surge and instead should have celebrated the success of the platform.
  • Others argue that it is reasonable for OpenFreeMap's author to limit traffic from a single user or site to prevent degradation of service for other users.
  • There is a debate about whether rate limiting by IP address or referer is the most effective way to manage traffic and prevent abuse.
  • Some commenters suggest that Wplace.live should have implemented caching to reduce the load on OpenFreeMap, but others argue that this may not have been feasible or a priority for the site.
  • The traffic surge was likely caused by a combination of human users and scripted requests, and it is difficult to distinguish between the two.
  • OpenFreeMap's architecture and Cloudflare's CDN performed well under the heavy load, with a high cache hit rate and successful request rate.
  • The situation highlights the importance of scalability and traffic management for online services, especially those that can be subject to sudden surges in popularity.