DDoS Mitigation Architecture for Competitive Dedicated Servers: Competitive Benchmark Analysis and Laitteisto Interactions

[Mia Peterson]

I’ve been stress-testing our tournament-grade dedicated servers and I’m hitting a wall with the DDoS scrubbing tradeoffs. We’re routing through an Anycast BGP setup with UDP flood scrubbing in front of the match servers, but I’m seeing frametime spikes of 8-12ms during active mitigation events that are completely unacceptable for competitive play—especially in tactical shooters where 10ms of input latency is the difference between winning and losing a gunfight. My question is: when you’re running stateful connection filtering alongside UDP scrubbing, how are you balancing the inspection overhead against connection latency? Have you noticed any correlation between scrubbing policy aggressiveness and increased jitter on the client side?

Beyond that, I’m curious about hardware scaling under sustained attack traffic. We’ve been running Ryzen 7950X nodes and I’m getting inconsistent frametimes even at idle CPU usage—makes me think it’s not just raw compute but something about how the NIC handles offloaded connections during a flood. Are you seeing better results with userspace packet processing like DPDK, or is standard kernel-side filtering sufficient? And for anyone running a competitive league, what’s your actual measured tolerance for added ping from scrubbing layers before players start reporting input lag?

"Crosshair placement and sound cues win 80% of gunfights. Keep your head cool."

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