Recently, an airdrop on the EOS mainnet has caused transaction rates on the network to skyrocket, reaching as much as 30x of the previous baseline. Many of the infrastructure services that EOS dapps depend on have struggled to keep up with this increase, or have completely crashed and remained down. dfuse has also felt the impact of this onslaught of traffic, but we’ve remained up and running, and are processing transactions as fast as the network can throw them at us -- up to an incredible 500 token transfers per second in recent days.
In this post we’ll cover what happened, and the challenges the dfuse team faced with storage, query planning and indexing, and abuse management as EOS traffic surged.