Effect of Comment Spam on Bandwidth
There was yet another severe comment spam attack this afternoon. We were already closely monitoring the webserver and as such were able to mitigate the attack fast enough as to avoid even tripping the uptime monitoring.
This graph shows the bandwidth effect during such an attack, as is visible the average inbound flow averages at approximately 300kbps, during the attack inbound flow spiked to 3.8mbps. It is important to note that for the purposes of this graph, inbound and outbound is reversed (inbound to the switch means outbound from the webserver itself).
This graph helps to illustrate how intense the load spike can be when traffic increases in such a massive way, particularly when considering this traffic is hitting dynamic and cpu-intensive Perl/cgi scripting.
