Last Monday, Joel Essler from the ClamAV project, asked for help mirroring the ClamAV antivirus database. As we from the IPFire project have some bandwidth left and as we are shipping ClamAV with the distribution as well , we decided to set up a mirror.
The ClamAV team has got a great mirror howto and with help of that, we soon had the mirror up and running. Within seconds after activation, we had outgoing traffic of 100 to 130 MBit per second, which instantly made our site a bit unresponsive. The huge load of clients sent hundreds of requests per second and the data that has been delivered to those clients was of multiple megabytes per request. Duh. We now limit the maximum amount of concurrent connections and also limit the maximum transfer speed so that all outgoing traffic is ~2MByte/s, which is the kind of bandwidth we can afford to share.
Why am I telling you this? If you can, please set up a mirror for the ClamAV antivirus database to take off the massive load of some servers. I am sure it will help a lot.