OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second

Summary

I was about to post about how nice the last 10 months of OpenFreeMap have been. The architecture has really proven itself to be great, Cloudflare has agreed to sponsor the bandwidth, Hetzner servers are super stable as always, serving tiles from Btrfs proved to be a great choice, nginx is amazing, and life is good.Then, out of the blue, I'm getting reports that some tiles are not loading, which normally means tile generation bugs, but not this time. I look into the nginx logs and see this:2025/08/08 23:08:16 [crit] 1084275#1084275: *161914910 open() "/mnt/ofm/planet-20250730_001001_pt/tiles/8/138/83.pbf" failed (24: Too many open files) ...This is weird. I've never seen anything like this. I check nload, and it shows huge traffic. I log into Cloudflare and I see THIS for the last 24 hours.What? 3 billion requests in 24 hours? What on Earth is that? Also, 215 TB of traffic from tiny, 70 kB files?This much traffic would cost over $6 million per month on MapTiler and double that on Mapbox.It's especially spiking in the last 5 minutes, where I'm seeing 30 million requests.How much is that?Wow, that's 100,000 requests per second!My first thoughts are:Wow.Wow, I'm surprised that the only bug I've heard about is some missing tiles. I mean, the service still seems to work? Somehow those empty tiles got cached by Cloudflare, but other than that, it still kind of works?Looking at the Cloudflare dashboard, I can see that 96% of the requests were 200 OK; only 3.6% were broken (206 Partial Content).So it seems that OpenFreeMap is mostly managing to serve 100,000 requests per second?Wplace.live happened. Out of the blue, a new collaborative drawing website appeared, built from scratch using OpenFreeMap.I don't know what it is, but the internet seems to be crazy about it. One thing is for sure: the traffic it generates is out of this world.I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies. If I understand correctly, the website limited everyon...