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Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx

join.piefed.social Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx - PieFed

Fediverse traffic is pretty bursty and sometimes there will be a large backlog of Activities to send to your server, each of which involves a POST. This can hammer your instance and overwhelm the backend’s ability to keep up. Nginx provides a rate-limiting function which can accept POSTs at full spe...

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/89462

Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx

Fediverse traffic is pretty bursty and sometimes there will be a large backlog of Activities to send to your server, each of which involves a POST. This can hammer your instance and overwhelm the backend’s ability to keep up. Nginx provides a rate-limiting function which can accept POSTs at full speed and proxy them slowly through to your backend at whatever rate you specify.

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2 comments
  • I wonder if it's of any utility to our instance.

  • I can only see this being effective if the Nginx instance isn't also responsible for reverse-proxying the frontend traffic, and if it's not running on the same server as the frontend or backend (ie. decoupled from the infrastructure serving the stack). Haven't looked at the article yet but I'm assuming they would recommend provisioning the infrastructure with that decoupling, or it wouldn't make much sense.