Fear China ⇥ furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry:

The number of requests [to the Iconfactory’s main server] peaked out at 52 Mbps. Let’s put that number in perspective: Daring Fireball is notorious for taking down sites by sending them about 500 Kbps of traffic. What we had just experienced was roughly the equivalent of 100 fireballs.

If each of those requests were 500 bytes, that’s 13,000 requests per second. That’s about a third of Google’s global search traffic. Look at how much careful planning went into handling Kim Kardashian’s butt at 8,000 requests per second.

All of this traffic directed at one IP address backed by a single server with a four core CPU.

Like I said, “Holy shit.”

On a scale of One to Deep Wedgie, this ranks pretty high on the nerdy scale, but it’s a real “holy shit” kind of story. I’ve had to block a couple of IP addresses for DDoS attempts, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Madness.