XRPL Developer Reports Unusual Traffic on Public XRPL Infrastructure: Details

XRPL developer Wietse Wind has flagged unusual traffic on XRPL’s public infrastructure.

He says while the infrastructure has reported lots of high traffic in the past, on Monday things changed as a crazy peak was recorded. HTTP requests and connection setup started sending thousands of requests per second.

Context: traffic has always been stable, high (lots of it), but consistent patterns, almost flatline (thanks to timezones).

Last Monday something changed. A crazy peak. These are just the HTTP requests, and all the connections setup then started sending thousands of requests per… pic.twitter.com/FhDKo5d5zv

— WietseWind (🛠 Xumm @ XRPL Labs) (@WietseWind) April 8, 2023

The XRPL developer went ahead to share a chart, which he referred to as the tip of the iceberg.

Regular requests typically sent about 10 queries per minute, this changed as Wind noted that since last Monday, requests have been sending 100-1000 (or even more) requests per second.

He further added that steps were implemented to fight off the traffic, as code was added to detect, throttle and block some queries. He adds a piece of good news, most of the traffic has been fought off, but a stable count is yet to be achieved.

The challenge with the mitigation steps, Wind says, might be the accidental flagging of legitimate traffic from explorers, wallets and the like, who send a lot of queries as well, but for the right reasons, while keeping the public XRPL infrastructure up.

Not network problem or DDoS attack

In between all this, Wind notes that XRPL is operating well as expected and that the issue he pointed out is not a network problem but rather that of “public nodes being hammered.”

He also answered a user who asked if it might be a DDoS attack. Wind replied in the negative, saying it might be due to traffic from poorly programmed arbitrage and trading bots.

In the wake of this, Wind urges XRPL power users and traders to take the highlighted steps for the health of the public XRPL infrastructure. These include not sending thousands of calls per second to free public infrastructure and not working around limitations by using multiple IPs.