We already sit behind the Akami DDOS prevention system. I do not think cloudflare would be any more effective.

When I look at the server - I am seeing the same behavior I saw when the big Lemmy instances started upgrading to v18. And these recent problems started when they started upgrading to release candidates for v18.3 - So I think this is a Lemmy federation problem not DDOS attacks.

We have plenty of bandwidth - do not even coming close to using it all. When we have these problems I am seeing spikes in CPU usage (normally 10% but spikes to 150% when we see these issues) and Disk I/O.

We plan upgrading the version of Lemmy we are running this weekend to see if that makes a difference.