> There has been upwards of 15 queries per second from bots. There is just no way to deal with that sort of traffic, barely even to reject it. If the queries a

> There has been upwards of 15 queries per second from bots. There is just no way to deal with that sort of traffic, barely even to reject it. If the queries are not a megabit each, you're doing way too much processing before applying rate limiting. Rejecting traffic ought not to take more than 1-2 milliseconds, even if you need to look up an api key or IP address in the database. I, too, host services on a residential connection: 50 mbps shared with other users. My domains must host hundreds of separate scripts, a few of which have a database attached (I can think of six off the top of my head, but there's over a hundred databases in mariadb so I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten about). This is a ten-year-old laptop with a regular "apt install mariadb", no special configs. Yes, most traffic is bots, and yes sometimes they submit more than 1 q/s. But it comes nowhere near to exhausting resources to a noticeable extent. Load average is about 0.15, main peaks come from my own cronjobs. If you're having this much trouble rejecting traffic, you might want to spend some time looking at bottlenecks. You'll also notice the bots knock it off if it's unsuccessful.