These readers download 544 KiB per request. At 1k rps from badly behaved readers, that's 544 MiB of uncached responses to encrypt and upload per second. That's

These readers download 544 KiB per request. At 1k rps from badly behaved readers, that's 544 MiB of uncached responses to encrypt and upload per second. That's enough to saturate a gigabit Ethernet link five times over. The server also has to process the useful requests on top of that.