OpenFreeMap survived 100,000 requests per second

https://blog.hyperknot.com/p/openfreemap-survived-100000-requests

Blog from the creator of openfreemap on how their site survived a DDos with the help of cloudflare.

I'm glad to see that they're still going with the project, and there are some interesting thoughts on high-performance tile serving in the news.yc comments

• The author is using nginx and an option for caching open file handles, and there's discussion on whether that's actually valuable on a fast NVMe drive
• There's an interesting question of how to handle empty files:

  • To optimize for ocean areas, tiles that don’t exist on disk should be served as a 200 OK with an empty body. These are then rendered as empty space on the map.

• The author posted in the nginx forum with some detailed perf questions; the question is worth reading but unfortunately does not have any replies yet