How palera1n brought my server to its knees

One day, I was very bored. I decided, why not create something fun on my file server? I have a file sharing server located at https://hhls.xyz/neko, where I occasionally upload images or videos to share online.

I started by adding a button with a number inside. Every click increments the counter for everyone. Then, I added a full screen progress bar background. The progress bar completely fills the screen at 1000 clicks.

It didn’t take long for people to completely fill this up. I then added a few more progress bars.

Then, I saw almost 10 requests per second. It must be someone else spamming the button, an auto clicker, or automated requests. I quickly added new progress bars up until 23 thousand clicks.

People were still spamming requests. Soon after, I added a feature where you could add a message for the next person to see. Anyone can edit this message, and anyone can see it.

After that, I changed the progress bar background to a rainbow background, that calculates the color using HSL. The hue is just the number of clicks, modulo 255.

It wasn’t long before I told people to just POST /neko/nya.php.

Minutes later, I was getting 100 requests a second.

At this point, every normal request to /neko was taking 2 seconds (under normal load is ~0.2 seconds).

While everyone was spamming the server, I was out on a hike, checking on the server and discord with my phone.

The 2 seconds quickly became 5, then after not too long, every request was taking 15 seconds.

I was heading home at this point. I wondered if my server was going to just completely stop working by the time I got home.

But no. My server kept working. Every request was now taking 20 seconds. People in the palera1n Discord server were thinking of new creative ways to spam my server. Someone wrote a program dedicated to spamming my server. First I saw python programs.

Then I saw JavaScript programs.

Before long, someone created a C program dedicated to incrementing the counter.

The amount of dedication, to inflating a counter on my server, baffles me.

I am rolling on the floor laughing.

At the time of writing this, there are 2,383,958 “nya”s.

Thank you to everyone in the palera1n server that clicked the button!