Source: http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

Unless you’re a network engineer, that graph won’t mean much. The data shown is the amount of bandwidth into the Iconfactory’s main server. The blue line is the number of megabits per second for requests and the green area is the amount for responses to those requests. Normally, the blue line is much smaller than the green area: a small HTTP request returns larger HTML, CSS and images.

The number of requests peaked out at 52 Mbps. Let’s put that number in perspective: Daring Fireball is notorious for taking down sites by sending them about 500 Kbps of traffic. What we had just experienced was roughly the equivalent of 100 fireballs.

If each of those requests were 500 bytes, that’s 13,000 requests per second. That’s about a third of Google’s global search traffic. Look at how much careful planning went into handling Kim Kardashian’s butt at 8,000 requests per second.

All of this traffic directed at one IP address backed by a single server with a four core CPU.

Like I said, “Holy shit.”