OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second

Feel free to migrate. If you ever worry about High Availability, self-hosting is always an option. But I'm working hard on making the public instance as reliable as possible.

I've just written my question to the nginx community forum, after a lengthy debugging session with multiple LLMs. Right now, I believe it was the combination of multi_accept + open_file_cache > worker_rlimit_nofile.

https://community.nginx.org/t/too-many-open-files-at-1000-re...

Also, the servers were doing 200 Mbps, so I couldn't have kept up _much_ longer, no matter the limits.

I actually have a direct answer for this: priorities. I run a fairly popular auction website and we have map tiles via stadia maps. We spend about $80/month on this service for our volume. We definitely could get this cost down to a lower tier by caching the tiles and serving them from our proxy. However we simply haven’t yet had the time to work on this, as there is always some other task which is higher priority.

Why should they when openfreemap is behind a CDN and their home page says things like:

> Using our public instance is completely free: there are no limits on the number of map views or requests. There’s no registration, no user database, no API keys, and no cookies. We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.

> Is commercial usage allowed?

> Yes.

IMHO, reading this and then just using it, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you could put a cache infront of their CDN, but why, when they said it's all good, no limits, for free?

I might wonder a bit, if I knew the bandwidth it was using, but I might be busy with other stuff if my site went unexpectedly viral.

It looks like a fun website, not a for-profit website. The expectations and focus of fun websites is more to just get it working than to handle the scale. It sounds like their user base exploded overnight, doubling every 14 hours or so. It also sounds like it’s other a solo dev or a small group based on the maintainers wording.

We are talking about an insane amount of data here. It was 56 Gbit/s (or 56 x 1 Gbit servers 100% saturated!). This is not something a "caching server" could handle. We are talking on the order of CDN networks, like Cloudflare, to be able to handle this.

What if one user really wants to browse around the world and explore the map. I remember spending half an hour in Google Earth desktop, just exploring around interesting places.

I think referer based limits are better, this way I can ask high users to please choose self-hosting instead of the public instance.

Yes, I designed the whole path structure / location blocks with caching in mind. Here is the generated nginx.conf, if you are interested:

https://github.com/hyperknot/openfreemap/blob/main/docs/asse...

Just scrolled around a little bit 2-3minutes with network monitor open. That already resulted in 500requests, 5MB transferred (after filtering by vector tile data). Not sure how many of those got cached by browser with no actual requests, cached by browser exchanging only headers or cached by cloudflare. I am guessing that the typical 10-20 requests/user case is for embedded map fragment like those commonly found in contact page where most users don't scroll at all or at most slightly zoom out to better see rest of city.

There are some user scripts to overlay templates on the map and coordinate working together, but I can't imagine that increases the load much. What might is that wplace has been struggling under the load and you have to refresh to see your pixels placed or any changes and that could be causing more calls an hour maybe?

99.38%

Do you even read the article?

96% during a unique event. I think you would typically consider long term in a stat like that.

Assuming it was close to 100% the rest of the year, that works out to 99.97% over 12 months.

If I were a consumer of a free service from someone who will not take your money to offer support or an SLA (i.e. is not trying to run a business), I would assume there's little to no monitoring at all.

Do you expect him just to let the service remain broken or to scale up to infinite cost to himself on this volunteer project? He worked with the project author to find a solution that works for both and does not degrade service for every other user, under literally no obligation to do anything at all. This isn’t Anthropic deciding to throttle users paying hundreds of dollars a month for a subscription. Constructive criticism is one thing, but entitlement to something run by an individual volunteer for free is absurd.

You are so entitled... Because of you most nice things have "no limits but...". Not cool stress testing someone's infrastructure. Not cool. The author of this post is more than understanding, tried to fix it and offered a solution even after blocking them. On a free service.

Show us what you have done.

the funny part is that his service didnt break- cloudflares cache caught 99% of the requests. just wanted to feel powerful and break the latest viral trend.