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:
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