I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

  • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    72·
    11 hours ago

    I’m not exactly sure why a web server can’t handle legit web traffic, just because it’s a lot?

    Its not because it’s a lot, it’s because it all happens in the same instant, which does not resemble any sort of normal web traffic.

    but solving it on the other side is bad architecture

    Solving it on the side that’s creating the problem is bad architecture? 🤔

    But it would never be truly solved that way.

    Several potential solutions have been posited, if you just look through the comments.

    • KeenFlame@feddit.nuEnglish
      17·
      11 hours ago

      Lots of normal traffic is instant. Throttling must be handled by for in this instance NPR or its providers routers because even if hammering is a bad practice, we are participating in why it happens at all if we just build structures to mitigate it.

      Yes that’s why I included a solution, and explained explicitly that it can be solved but only temporarily

      • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
        43·
        10 hours ago

        Lots of normal traffic is instant

        Not instant from a thousand different servers. That’s what a botnet looks like. AKA DDOS. That’s why I explained that. Why are you acting like you don’t understand this?

        Throttling must be handled by for in this instance NPR

        No. It mustn’t. AP servers can fix it on their end.

        Yes that’s why I included a solution

        Which you then went on to explain wasn’t a solution…?

        • KeenFlame@feddit.nuEnglish
          26·
          9 hours ago

          You may suffer from irritation of your ego my friend. Know that you are not your ideas or projects, you are more than that. I feel like all of your questions were previously answered sorry.

          • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
            31·
            9 hours ago

            You may suffer from the dumbs, my friend. My questions were answered. Before you showed up.