So if I'm reading this correctly, multiple people can basically brick the site at the same time if they decided to have the website load a fuck-ton of images at the same time? Say, for example, if they all clicked the "smilies" icon in the reply box... given how many fucking smilies KF has as an option, all those little icons would eventually build-up to GBs of data to where the server couldn't handle it?
the static asset isnt the worst of it.
every click on a smile/reaction creates a database call, and that in turn causes another database call to notify the recipient with a badge. so that causes 1000s of operations. its normal for hm to have 4000+ people on the site including anonymous viewers.
but when theyve attracted 8000-10000+ the site starts falling over.
I assume videos are worse since they don't load as instantly as pictures do?
thats part of it, because the webserver socket/thread is tied up serving you that video.
instead of opening, and sending you text or a picture for a few seconds and then closing ...
it stays open longer than other types of content.
someone on a slow shitty TOR circuit could take 3-4x longer to get the content and keep that socket open. When the webservers out of available handles/sockets thats when uou start seeing the 5XX errors and a white page. there are no threads to serve you.
hes using some caching (openresty)
but when the "origin server" (the real webserver behind openresty) doesnt have any available threads/sockets you get the 5XXes.
the caching server (openresty) has to get a socket, just like i would with a browser IF we were hitting it directly.
you can only do so much "caching" of content because its dynamically updating with all the niggerfaggot likes, reacts, hearts, tophats, etc. so even with openresty or a caching server, best case he can cache images and CSS and shit like that but the page is constantly changing to let you know "there are new posts, (view)" , or to give you the badge that you had a react or reply.
Let's all open like 20 tabs loading the biggest file on the site at once. Just to see.
if youre going to do
that, throtte your interface to 1kb/s or dialup speed so you hog the socket 100x longer and make the page take five fucking minutes to load. thats the hint about a "ddos" vector if the sites already redlining. supposedly someones hitting him with 1000+ VPS, TOR, VPN or whatever the fuck but theyre doing it at full blast. If theyd done some traffic shaping on the NIC first to throttle 1000 clients to dialup speed it probably would have taken the site down.
assuming again, that thats even what happened.
or taken longer to sort out that "this clients attacking me" v. "this is just some slow piece of shit client on TOR"
whatever the cause of the last couple outages were or werent he does seem to be telling the truth about doing some tuning.
the difference between a "DDOS" and a "hug of death" is that "DDOS" means someone did it on purpose, coordinating 1000+ clients, or a "hug of death" just means that 1000 people just clicked a link to KF in some discord or livestream and the site fell over. that is not a ddos. if youre vulnerable to this you could be ddosed this way is all im saying.
given KF's reputation, people would be smart to load a VPN or TOR or proxy before clicking that link. but is he just seeing 1000 randos on suspicious connections (vpn/vps/tor) and freaking out that its an "attack" or are these people who watch KF the same way KF watches "lolcows" and are just terrified of the evil hacker known as kiwifarms getting their IP and dox.......