Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/89462

Handling large bursts of POST requests to your ActivityPub inbox, using a buffer in Nginx

Fediverse traffic is pretty bursty and sometimes there will be a large backlog of Activities to send to your server, each of which involves a POST. This can hammer your instance and overwhelm the backend’s ability to keep up. Nginx provides a rate-limiting function which can accept POSTs at full speed and proxy them slowly through to your backend at whatever rate you specify.