We Probably Served Close to 100 Million Gemini Requests
Many of these requests probably came from bots, but it's hard to distinguish (to block them)
The Gemini Protocol was adopted by us more than 4 years ago. At first it was running directly and serving directly from my home, having been configured to be dealt with by a humble single-board computer (SBC). Years later it became too much; traffic bursts and surges (caused by bots in Geminispace) would not just overwhelm the SBC but slow down our entirely home network (LAN), resulting in problems irrespective of the residential ISP connection. Since the SBC runs nightly backups there are likely interferences, with an unpredictable external factor like DDoS. So we moved all the capsules to the datacentre. Since then we have not had to worry about network bottlenecks and there are days when we see hundreds of thousands of Gemini requests. Most days it's just tens of thousands. Adding up numbers for yearlong totals, we guess we're not far from 100 million.
Bots in Gemini are a nuisance we wrote about several times in the past; blocking them without prejudice isn't simple. Many technical folks - dorks and orcs - read Geminispace and some of them set up some VPS to "collect" stories for them; such bots are benign and mostly desirable.
This coming summer Gemini Protocol will turn 6. It's not some "new" thing anymore. █