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Comment by pstadler | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward for a post from GitHub describing what exactly was thrown at them and how they were able to mitigate it.

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For what it's worth there's an article[1] from Craig Hockenberry. His servers were hit by massive amounts of traffic from China earlier this year, targeted (randomly?) at Iconfactory's website. The charts are quite impressive.

[1] http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

That (52 Mbit/s) was extremely small in comparison to modern DDoS attacks (which can be in the hundreds to thousands of Gbit/s).

It could have been launched from a single raspberry pi with a 100 Mbit/s residential uplink.

Agreed about the extremely small attack, but one pi couldn't have done it. You'd need at least two or three. A pi will only get you to ~3Mb/s sustained ethernet. That's because ethernet is tacked onto the USB subsystem in a funny way.

I guess I meant a raspberrypi 2. :)

http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gig...

That doesn't look anything like the attack on GitHub. His server buckled from a couple of thousand requests because his webserver was misconfigured. GitHub probably handles an order of magnitude more requests on any normal day.

I'm not sure you understand the concept of "order of magnitude". Taken literally, you're saying you think Github handles 10 000 requests per day, which is about a factor of 10 000 to 100 000 (4-5 orders of magnitude) too low.

No. Per second. That would work out to ~ 1 M req/day. I have absolutely no idea if that's in the right ballpark or not, my point was that the misconfiguration that took down some guy's web server has absolutely nothing in common with what Github faces.

Ok, per second it makes more sense. I couldn't find hard stats either, but one semi-dubious-looking traffic tracker said github.com sees 10 million req/day. It looked like that was for just the front page; how do we even define what a request is? For more reliable sources such as Alexa you have to pay to get these numbers.

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