Both events maxed the memory and CPU, and those events caused the OS to kill the database each time, which sounds crazy but that's a normal chain of events. I restarted the db both times and things were back to normal.
So what was it?
Memory doesn't spike due to magic, or cosmic alignment. Something causes it. I didn't have to look far:
- Screenshot 2024-08-20 at 2.36.07 PM.jpg (74.29 KiB) Viewed 985 times
Hm. That's a whole lot of users on August 16, the day, hour, and minute the first attack occurred. This strongly points to a DDoS attack. The attack, at ~9400 bots (~30X normal traffic), was weak by industry standards, but MVS is a small server by industry standards, so the effect was server knockout.
Yesterday, after the second event, it was clear this was going to happen again and again so I did a sweeping set of changes (reconfigurations). And lo and behold, as if on cue another attack rolled in... and the server passed. I didn't expect the evening attack, but thanks to whoever cued it up because I got to test my changes.
Look at the spike at 18:30... it's just as brutal as the others, but MVS kept ticking, which validated my changes. If you want to read more about cyberattacks with very recent data, see this https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/ddos-2024-q2
